All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race - before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its god to be truthful and understandable in his communications.

Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.

Every virtue has its privilege: for example, that of contributing its own little bundle of wood to the funeral pyre of one condemned.

Not with wrath do we kill, but with laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

Time flies apace-we would fain believe that everything flies forward with it.

In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.

Having become conscious of the truth he once perceived, man now sees only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence, he now understands the symbolic element in Ophelia's fate, he now recognizes the wisdom of the woodland god, Silenus: it nauseates him.