Jesus produced mainly three effects: hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself

The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other...

The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.

The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event.

I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse... Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil.