When I was twelve years old I thought up an odd trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My inference wasthat God, in contemplating himself, created the second person of the godhead; but that, in order to be able to contemplate himself, he had to contemplate, and thus to create, his opposite.--With this I began to do philosophy.
We are compelled by the theory of God's already achieved perfection to make Him a devil as well as a god, because of the existenceof evil. The god of love, if omnipotent and omniscient, must be the god of cancer and epilepsy as well.... Whoever admits that anything living is evil must either believe that God is malignantly capable of creating evil, or else believe that God has made many mistakes in His attempts to make a perfect being.
How important the concept of God is, and how instead of valuing what has been given us, we with light hearts spurn it because of absurdities that have been attached to it.
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.
He must pull out his own eyes, and see no creature, before he can say, he sees no God; He must be no man, and quench his reasonable soul, before he can say to himself, there is no God.
It is not woman who claims the highest in man. It is a man's own religious soul that drives him on beyond women, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to God alone.