I was laughed at by everyone upon every occasion. But no one knew or guessed that if there was a man on this earth who knew better than anyone how ridiculous I was, that man was myself, and that was the thing that I found most exasperating of all, that they did not know it.

... the more I learned, the more conscious did I become of the fact that I was ridiculous. So that for me my years of hard work at the university seem in the end to have existed for the sole purpose of demonstrating and proving to me, the more deeply engrossed I became in my studies, that I was an utterly absurd person.

And man has actually invented God. And what’s strange, what would be marvellous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.

There are... things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

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

Without some goal and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.