What determined the outcome of a life? A series of random events you had no control over, or did some cosmic gravity pull everything in the direction it was predestined to go?
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
We’re brought up to expect a happy ending. But there are no happy endings. There’s only death waiting for us. We find love and happiness, and it’s snatched away from us without rhyme or reason. We’re on a deserted space ship careening mindlessly among the stars. The world is Dachau, and we’re all Jews.
We use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.[Nous travaillons à tout moment à donner sa forme à notre vie, mais en copiant malgré nous comme un dessin les traits de la personne que nous sommes et non de celle qu’il nous serait agréable d’être.]
We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we’re awake.
We should show life neither as it is nor as it ought to be, but as we see it in our dreams.[Надо изображать жизнь не такою, как она есть, и не такою, как должна быть, а такою, как она представляется в мечтах.]
We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
We go through life like a train rushing through the darkness to an unknown destination.
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.[Wir fühlen, dass selbst, wenn alle möglichen wissenschaftlichen Fragen beantwortet sind, unsere Lebensprobleme noch gar nicht berührt sind.]
