It is thus only this personal feeling of misery that we get rid of by acts of pity.

Just look at the faces of the great Christians! They are the faces of great haters.

Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural. World has known many moral systems, each of which advances claims universality; all moral systems are therefore particular, serving a specific purpose for their propagators or creators, and enforcing a certain regime that disciplines human beings for social life by narrowing our perspectives and limiting our horizons.

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.

That little hypocrites and half-crazed people dare to imagine that on their account the laws of nature are constantly broken; such an enhancement of every kind of selfishness to infinity, to impudence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt. And yet Christianity owes its triumph to this pitiable flattery of personal vanity.

Evolution does not make happiness its goal; it aims simply at evolution and nothing else.

At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.