It seems to me that to take a book of mine into his hands is one of the rarest distinctions that anyone can confer upon himself. I even assume that he removes his shoes when he does so-not to speak of boots.
Assuming that he believes at all, the everyday Christian is a pitiful figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him.
There are highly gifted spirits who are always infertile simply because, owing to a weakness in temperament, they are too impatient to wait out their pregnancy to term.
In certain pious people I have found a hatred of reason, and have been favourably disposed to them for it: their bad intellectual conscience was at least exposed by that!
Whoever possesses abundant joy must be a good man: but he is probably not the cleverest man, although he achieves exactly what it is that the cleverest man strives with all his cleverness to achieve.
Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed; - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!
Everyone who enjoys supposes that the tree was concerned with the fruit, but it was really concerned with the seed. -In this lies the difference between all those who create and those who enjoy.