A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at the end, for a pleasant death.

At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.

In certain pious people I have found a hatred of reason, and have been favourably disposed to them for it: their bad intellectual conscience was at least exposed by that!

The State is the coldest of all cold monsters, and coldly it tells lies, and this lie drones on from its mouth: 'I, the State, am the people'.

Assuming that he believes at all, the everyday Christian is a pitiful figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him.