gives birth”—it’s much more noble. Yet we have the right to make such distinctions because we assign the meaning to the world by naming names of things; we inhabit a different sphere and we capitalize...

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

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

Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual,...

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...

natural” accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place...

He has no doubts, there is nothing you can say to sway him, to give him hope or trust. He is a miserable animal whose body decays, who will die, who will pass into dust...

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith

…Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and...

We are gods with anuses.

Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.

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

Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a...

[Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.

Too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the powers of the symbolic self. It reflects the attempt to exaggerate one half of the human dualism at the expense of the other....

Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude – even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effacement, surrender to...