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

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

The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil.

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

People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves

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.

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it.