Socrates.- If all goes well, the time will come when one will take up the memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible as a guide to morals and reason... The pathways of the most various philosophical modes of life lead back to him... Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in being able to be serious cheerfully and in possessing that wisdom full of roguishness that constitutes the finest state of the human soul. And he also possessed the finer intellect.
Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.
He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself.
Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches and in punishment there is so much that is festive!
Enduring habits I hate.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.