When self control is lacking in small things, the ability to apply it to matters of importance withers away. Every day in which one does not at least deny himself some trifle is badly spent and a threat to the day following.
What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit - the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is depleted, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again.
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.
Interest in Education will acquire great strength only from the moment when belief in a God and His care is renounced, just as the art of healing could only flourish when the belief in miracle cures ceased.
But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death"?
These small things - nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness - are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far.
. . . an absurd problem came to the surface: 'How COULD God permit that (crucifixion of Jesus Christ)!' . . . the deranged reason of the little community found quite a frightfully absurd answer: God gave his Son for forgiveness, as a SACRIFICE . . . The SACRIFICE FOR GUILT, and just in its most repugnant and barbarous form - the sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What horrifying heathenism!
The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.
Contentment preserves one from catching cold. Has a woman who knew that she was well dressed ever caught a cold? No, not even when she had scarcely a rag on her back.