Speaking generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of resistance.
The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.
We seldom break a leg as long as we are climbing wearily upwards in our lives, instead we do it when we start going easy on ourselves and choosing the comfortable paths.
We feign pity when we want to demonstrate our ascendancy over feelings of hostility: but usually in vain. Whenever we notice this,there is an accompanying surge in those hostile sensations.
God is a too palpably clumsy answer; an answer which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers-fundamentally, even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!
Morality makes stupid.- Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid.
'God himself cannot exist without wise men' - Luther said, and was right. But 'God can exist even less without unwise men' - that good old Luther did not say.
The perfect woman perpetrates literature as she perpetrates a small sin: as an experiment, in passing, glancing around to see whether anybody notices--and to make sure that somebody notices.
Many things about man are not very godly: whenever a person excretes feces, how can he be a god then? But it is even worse regarding the other feces we call sin: man still surely wants to retain this, and not excrete it. Now however, I must believe it: a person can be God and still excrete feces. Thus I teach you, excrete your feces and become gods.