Life Is Hard

The question is how to feel about everything, about the whole of existence and the place of humankind within it

When we do not know what we should hope for, we can hope to learn.

The meaning of life—the truth that tells us how to feel about the whole residual cosmos—would lie in our halting, perhaps perpetual, progress toward justice in this world.

We want to be reconciled, somehow, to loss and failure, injustice and human suffering. We are hoping for a truth that will take the edge off our despair.

why should we believe that there is any way we ought to feel, that reality dictates our total reaction to life

it always involves a metaphysics of transcendence.

Religion is, I believe, essentially metaphysical.

The joy of being free from pain is like a picture that vanishes when you try to look at it