Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.

A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

...all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.

To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.

Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.

Sadness makes you God's prisoner.

Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.

Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.

The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.

The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness.

There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.

The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.

A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.

The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing

All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.

Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women.