The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To that indifference, the only dignified response is to burn with a hard, gem-like flame.

We are always in our own company. Sometimes I feel I could tear myself open, not out of pain, but out of curiosity.

We are condemned to be free; and with that freedom comes the anguish of choosing, for in choosing we define what man ought to be, and there is no escaping the weight of that definition.

We are development. We are process. We are not what we are, but what we are making of ourselves. The self is not a being but an act.

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To that indifference we owe both our freedom and our terror.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. And the condemned man can see other people through the windows of his cell, and they can see him, but they cannot communicate.

It is not the same to talk of bulls from behind the barriers as to be in the bullring. I have been in the bullring, and I know that fear is not in the legs but in the soul.

The most common form of despair is not being who you are.

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.

We live, as we dream — alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To the large mind of the astronomer it is neither cruel nor kind, but only stupendous — and that is almost worse than cruelty.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

The true paradox of human freedom is that we are most ourselves when we are most constrained by the necessity of our circumstances.

We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are forced to choose, and yet there is no certain ground on which to base our choices.

The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are responsible for what we make of ourselves, yet we perpetually seek to escape this responsibility through bad faith and self-deception.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and the machine now invents us. We do not live, we are lived.

The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machines, but we do not know how to live with them.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents, and only the most radical knowledge of the authenticity of being can save us.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents, and only the most radical knowledge and the most intimate courage can possibly enable us to endure.

The true paradox is that we become most fully alive at the moment when we cease to live for ourselves alone. It is in the surrender of self that self is found.

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by drowning in our own thoughts.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of such a world is a form of rebellion.