11 quotes
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
The Denial of Death (1973)
It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.
The Denial of Death (1973)
All religions fall far short of their own ideals.
The Denial of Death (1973)
Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility,; especially when the choice comes too late in life for one to be able to start over again.
The Denial of Death (1973)
The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.
The Denial of Death (1973)
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 Denial of Death (1973)
Beyond a given point man is not helped by more "knowing", but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way.
The Denial of Death (1973)
The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed.
The Denial of Death (1973)
No wonder that historically art and psychosis have had such an intimate relationship, that the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
The Denial of Death (1973)
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.
The Denial of Death (1973)
With the truth, one cannot live. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which first condition the outer [i.e., a secure sense of one’s active powers, and of being able to count on the powers of others].
The Denial of Death (1973)