QUOTE : Oh, why is man not immortal? he thinks. Why brain centers and convolutions, why sight, speech, self-awareness, genius, if it is all doomed to sink into the ground and in the final end to cool down along with the earth’s crust and then whirl without sense or purpose, for millions of years, with the earth around the sun? For that cooling down and whirling around there was no need at all to bring man out of non-being, along to other his lofty, almost divine reason, and then, as if in mockery, turn him into clay. The life cycle! But what cowardice to comfort oneself with this surrogate of immortality! The unconscious processes that occur in nature are even lower than human stupidity, for in stupidity there is still consciousness and will, while in these processes there is nothing. Only a coward whose fear of death is greater than his dignity can comfort himself with the thought that in time his body will live in grass, a stone, a toad... To see one's own immortality in the life cycle is as strange as to prophesy a brilliant future to the case after the costly violin has been broken and made useless.