If you want me to believe in your redeemer, you are going to have to look a lot more redeemed.

Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

The arrogance that accompanies merit offends us even more than the arrogance of people who are lacking in merit: since merit itself offends us.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.