Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains, although I do not know who assumed that it could. But it can put mountains where there are none.
In short, then, the religious cult is based upon the representations of sorcery between man and man, and the sorcerer is older than the priest.
Interest in Education will acquire great strength only from the moment when belief in a God and His care is renounced, just as the art of healing could only flourish when the belief in miracle cures ceased.
School has no task more important than to teach strict thought, cautious judgment, and logical conclusions, hence it must pay no attention to what hinders these operations, such as religion, for instance.
A few hours of mountain climbing make a blackguard and a saint two rather similar creatures.
The belief in authority is the source of conscience; which is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man.
The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any “God,” or any “sinner,” or any “Saviour” that “free will” and the “moral order of the world” are lies : serious reflection, the profound self conquest of the spirit, allow no man to pretend that he does not know it.
The “religion of pity” to which people would like to convert us- oh, we know well enough the hysterical little men and women who need this religion at present as a veil and an adornment!
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!
If God had wanted to become an object of love, he would first of all have had to forgo judging and justice : a judge, and even a gracious judge, is no object of love.
Religious War has signified the greatest advance of the masses so far, for it proves that the masses have begun to treat concepts with respect.
Once blasphemy again God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and thereupon those blasphemers died too.
To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!
Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that “above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wantonness”.
It is however a disgrace to pray! Not for all, but for you, and me, and whoever has his a conscience.
Has there ever been anything filthier on earth than the saints in the wilderness? Around them was not only the devil loose around them- but also the swine.
I live in my own place – have never copied anyone even half, and at any master who lacks the grace – to laugh at himself – I laugh.
A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god.
There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world weary, will weary, and one day he suffocated through his excessive pity.
One must separate from anything that forces one to repeat No again and again.