The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
Obviously, all religions fall far short of their own ideals.
Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility.
People were always ready to yield theirwills, to worship the hero, because they were not given a chancefor developing initiative, stability, and independence, said the greatnineteenth-century Russian sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky
[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.
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.
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.
Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order tolive at all.
Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.
…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 a body that is worth about 98¢.
Men use one another to assure their personal victory over death.