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

What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

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

We are gods with anuses.

We might say that psychoanalysis revealed to us the complex penalties of denying the truth of man's condition, what we might call the costs of pretending not to be mad.

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.

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.