In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.
For myself, I do not now know in any concrete human terms wherein my individuality consists. In my present human form of consciousness I simply cannot tell.
Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.
The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.
There's no such thing as identity: it's something we have to believe in to make life more tolerable.
As to the mental essence, we find it in infants devoid of every mental form.
If you study my paintings, there are no signs of human life.
For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.
Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness.
It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living.