John Allard

“I am therefore responsible for myself and for everyone else, and I am fashioning a certain image of man as I choose him to be In choosing myself, I choose man.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“wound; can even kill. Yet the duty of the writer must be to observe and to name exactly: wounding, even possibly killing. For what the writer must name in describing are inevitably imperfections. Perfection in life does not exist; and if it did, it would be — not lovable but admirable, possibly even a bore. Perfection lacks personality. (All the Buddhas, they say, are perfect, perfect and therefore alike. Having gained release from the imperfections of this world, they have left it, never to return. But the Bodhisattvas, remaining, regard the lives and deeds of this imperfect world with eyes and tears of compassion.) For let us note well (and here is the high point of Mann's thinking on this subject): what is lovable about any human being is precisely his imperfections. The writer is to find the right words for these and to send them like arrows to their mark — but with a balm, the balm of love, on every point. For the mark, the imperfection, is exactly what is personal, human, natural, in the object, and the umbilical point of its life.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Individual asexual organisms die by mistake - when the run out of something, or when they experience a lethal accident. Sexual organisms are designed to die, preprogrammed to do so. Death serves as a poignant reminder of our limitations and frailties - and of the bond with our ancestors who, in a way, died that we might live.”
― Carl Sagan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

“This is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything that he does.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism