To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.

Do you know that ages will pass and mankind will proclaim in its wisdom and science that there is no crime and, therefore no sin, but that there are only hungry people. "Feed them first and then demand virtue of them!" - that is what they will inscribe on their banner which they will raise against you and which will destroy your temple.

Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are to blame for them.

If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.

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

Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.

Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.

In most cases, people, even the most vicious, are much more naive and simple-minded than we assume them to be. And this is true of ourselves too.

I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.

People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.