The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears

We are what we fear in others

The first element is the experience of the power of being which is present even in the face of the most radical manifestation of non being. If one says that in this experience vitality resists despair, one must add that vitality in man is proportional to intentionality. The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.

Could this reaction against the personal by [analytic] philosophers … be, at bottom, one of fear? … Are … bright people … blindly afraid of their own precarious identity and unspeakable vulnerability as particular bodily beings?

We catch frightful glimpses of ourselves in the hostile eyes of others.

What makes the vanity of others unsupportable is that it wounds our own.

389. — What makes the vanity of others unsupportable is that it wounds our own.

We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.

Shielding ourselves from the vulnerability of all living beings — which includes our own vulnerability — cuts us off from the full experience of life.

We want our freedom; we want to be ourselves, but we are also afraid to be by ourselves.

What makes the vanity of others insufferable to us is that it wounds our own.

Why do people need to have control over the lives of others? Why this fear of the other? This fear of difference — the fear of change — why this fear of our own bodies? Why this inability to accept our own death? What are the connections between those things?

Nothing makes us angrier than the fear that some pleasure is being enjoyed by others but forever denied to us.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.