Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.

Astrology furnishes a splendid proof of the contemptible subjectivity of men in consequence whereof they refer everything to themselves and from every idea at once go straight back to themselves. Astrology refers the course of celestial bodies to the miserable ego; it also establishes a connection between the comets in heaven and the squabbles and rascalities on earth.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

The majority of men... are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.

Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.