The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. 
Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing. 
The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. 
Necessity with the illusion of meaning would be the highest achievement for man; but when it becomes trivial there is no sense to one's life. 
What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. 
Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem. 
Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals. 
Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility. 
The warding off of anxiety is central to the time-binding, action-delaying, and cerebral functions of the human animal. 
Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates. 
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level. 
Each society is a hero system which promises victory over evil and death. 
The road to creativity passes ... 
Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt. 
To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything. 
The "healthy" person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the "real" man, is the one who has transcended himself. 
From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance. - LEO TOLSTOI 
To grow up at all is to conceal the mass of internal scar tissue that throbs in our dreams. 
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else. 
The point is that if the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it. 
Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship. 
Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order tolive at all.
