For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering.

Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass.

But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that if you have the guillotine in the forefront, and with such glee, it's for the sole reason that cutting heads off is the easiest thing, and having an idea is difficult!

I swear to you, sirs, that excessive consciousness is a disease--a genuine, absolute disease.

God is necessary, and therefore must exist...But I know that he does not and cannot exist...Don't you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living?

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.

Without a clear perception of his reasons for living, man will never consent to live, and will rather destroy himself than tarry on earth, though he be surrounded with bread".