Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.

Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.

We might say that both the artist and theneurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project.

To live is to play at the meaning of life...The upshot of this . . . is that it teaches us once and for all that childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men.

Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.

For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.