How many of us human animals could endure the sight of our own selves, stripped of the garments of illusion with which we clothe them? In our infancy others begin to garb us in conventional illusions to spare their own sight, and later we ourselves continue the process - we carefully deck ourselves out in elaborate regalia of pretence to hide the raw nakedness of our souls, not only from others, but from ourselves as well. We hate most those who strip us bare - and their motive is generally one of self-protection, as a man points out the deformities in others to draw attention away from his own defects.

- <i>A Thunder of Trumpets</i>

O how can wicked men seem so steady and untouched with such black hearts, while poor innocents stand like malefactors before them!

People who live in society have learned to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. Is that why my flesh is naked? You might say - yes you might say, nature without humanity… Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.

Most truth's are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.

the religion which treats its flock as a credulous plaything offers one of the cruelest spectacles that can be imagined: a human being in fear and doubt who is openly exploited to believe in the impossible

But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves. It is disagreeable for me to recall and write these things, but I set them down that my story may lack nothing. Those who have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will find my brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for they know what is wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to tortured men. But those who have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to elemental things, will have a wider charity.

When they face desperation... human beings become animals.

I have often imagined that people who carry on about how God “thinks” human beings should behave must appear to be complete fools to the divine.

Almost all Christians being wretchedly enslaved to blindness and ignorance, which the priests are so far from preventing or removing, that they blacken the darkness, and promote the delusion: wisely foreseeing that the people (like cows, which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked), would part with less if they knew more...

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible7 is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God.

Too many times naked women and death walked side by side.

People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.