Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.

One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.

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 cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

Love is the problem of an animal.