There is something which, for want of a better name, we shall call the tragic sense of life, and it carries along with it an entire conception of the Universe and of life itself, an entire philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious.  And this sense may animate, and does animate, not only individual men, but entire peoples.  And this sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though later these ideas react upon it and corroborate it . . . But there is more to it than that:  man, because he is man, because he possesses consciousness, is already, in comparison to the jackass or the crab, a sick animal. Consciousness is a disease. 

Man is possessed either of an excess of matter or an excess of spirit, or to put it better, either he feels a spiritual hunger, that is, a hunger for eternity or he feels a material hunger, that is, a hunger to submit to annihilation.  When spirit is in excess and man feels a hunger for yet more of it, he pours his own spirit out and spreads it abroad, and as it pours out it grows by contact with the spirits of others; when, on the other hand, avarice takes hold, man withdraws into himself, thinking thus to better preserve himself, and ends by losing everything . . . It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to the anguish and torment of spirit.

Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people.  We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.

The passion to be remembered if possible when oblivion overtakes all others is tremendous. From it flows every envy, the cause, according to the biblical narrative, of the crime which began human history: the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. It was not a struggle for bread: it was a struggle to survive in God, in the divine memory. Envy is a thousand times more terrible than physical hunger, for envy, is a spiritual hunger. If the so-called problem of life, the basic problem of food, were ever solved, the earth would be turned into a hell, as the struggle for survival would become even more intense . . . We aim at being everything because we feel it is the only way to escape being nothing.