“A noble heart should not belie its thoughts; it wants to reveal itself even to its inmost depths. There everything is good, at least everything is human.”

“The human heart is certainly an abyss of misery and sin, but God lies in its depths.”

“Thus the will to live everywhere preys upon itself, and in different forms is its own nourishment, till finally the human race, because it subdues all the others, regards nature as a manufactory for its own use. Yet even the human race...reveals in itself with most terrible distinctness this conflict, this variance of the will with itself; and we find homo homini lupus.”

“We succumb at the end and are resorbed by the cosmos, itself a great and dying corpse. It's a noble fate and should be faced with nobility.”

“The human heart has a way of making itself large again even after it's been broken into a million pieces.”

“If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism — at least in the sense of this work — is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.”