Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light--I call it a divine capacity for lightness.
Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature
Intoxicating joy is it for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, did the world once seem to me.
A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute. Mortal hostility against the masters of the earth, against the 'noble', that is also Christian; hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind, is Christian; hatred of the senses, of joy in general, is Christian.