In Kierkegaard, psychology and religion, philosophy and science, poetry and truth merge indistinguishably together in the yearning of the creature.

The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the idea of death and annihilation, but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

To see the world as it really is, is devastating and terrifying… It makes routine automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living… an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos, and the problem of the meaning of it.

The hostility to psychoanalysis in the past, today, and in the future, will always be a hostility against admitting that man lives by lying to himself, about himself, and about his world…”

Each thing is a problem, and man can shut out nothing.

"The ever-frustrated effort to gain complete assurance by reviewing the data becomes the special anxiety which we call a sense of responsibility... for the degree that intelligence is systematic doubt it cannot trust itself."

-Alan Watts

"Instead of repeatedly implementing systems that squelch the feeling of aliveness, then abandoning them in despair, you could try navigating by that feeling instead. You could pursue only those systems that seem to heighten the feeling of aliveness, and pursue them only so long as they continue to do so. You could call off the search for the perfect system, and get to grips with the reality in front of you instead."

• Oliver Burkeman

"The lesson here isn't that systems and techniques are worthless. For me, instead, the answer has been to keep using them, but to relate to them differently: to demote them, I suppose, from things I try to use to live life for me, to things I use to help me live my life."

• Oliver Burkeman