Judas betrayed Jesus. Lady Red betrayed John Dillinger. Those things happen.

Secretly we’re all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.

It’s just human nature to try and figure things out. So, when we’re in the midst of a situation, we usually try to reason our way through it.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

Jesus isn’t lettin‘ you off the hook. The Scriptures don’t let you off the hook so easily… When people say, you know, ‚Good teacher‘, ‚Prophet‘, ‚Really nice guy‘ … this is not how Jesus thought of Himself.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

The proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

People should not make me out to be like Jesus; I don’t walk on water.

Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest.

Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know? If they were to paint a picture of Jesus without contradictions, the gospels would be fake, but the contradictions are a sign of authenticity.

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

So far as I am concerned, I could not be accused of having set eyes, or having wished to set eyes, upon Darius‘ wife: on the contrary, I have refused even to listen to those who spoke to me of her beauty.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

Friendships, in general, are suddenly contracted; and therefore it is no wonder they are easily dissolved.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.

Hell is other people.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

What an encouraging thought that Jesus – our beloved Husband – can find comfort in our lowly feeble gifts! Can this be, for it seems far too good to be true? May we then be willing to endure trials or even death itself if through these hardships we are assisted in bringing gladness to Immanuel’s heart.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

If you’re going to wake up early all the time, and you’re working hard, and you’re working out, sometimes you’re going to get tired. It’s OK. It’s acceptable – somewhat. We’re all human, unfortunately.

If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

The ‚New Testament‘, now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood – a material that couldn’t have been widely available in Palestine.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

Desire is the essence of a man.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians – you are not like him.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

I don’t like people going behind my back.

Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.

Was Jesus the son of God? Yes. But so are you. You just haven’t realized it yet.