I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence.
I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.
Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty.
If we forgive God for his crime against us, which is to have made us finite creatures, He will forgive our crime against him, which is that we are finite creatures.
Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud , also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology .
I finally figured out what my crime was. I lived. Big mistake.
In the deepest sense, the being in a state of sin is the sin, the particular sins are not the continuation of sin, they are expressions of its continuation.
For man's greatest crime is to have been born.
They are commiting murder who merely live.
I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of feeling less guilty about the universe.
The one-sided exploitation of existential guilt is thought reform's trump card, and perhaps its most important source of emotional influence over its participants. Revolving around it are issues most decisive to thought reform's outcome.
If self-absorption, vague yearnings, and a nagging sense of incompleteness are sins, then surely I will burn for all eternity, and I will save you a seat.
Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the one normal writer left on earth and it is this that adds to his isolation and so to his sense of guilt.
