ne?

The life of all animals is short. Could he make it longer?

All animals are the prey of each other: everything is born to be
devoured. Could he form without destroying?

You do not know what nature is. You cannot therefore know if nature has
not forced him to do only the things he has done.

This globe is only a vast field of destruction and carnage. Either the
great Being has been able to make of it an eternal abode of delight for
all sentient beings, or He has not been able. If He has been able and if
He has not done so, fear to regard him as malevolent; but if He has not
been able, fear not to look on Him as a very great power, circumscribed
by nature in His limits.

Whether or no His power is infinite does not regard you. It is a matter
of indifference to a subject whether his master possesses five hundred
leagues of land or five thousand; he is subject neither more nor less.

Which would be the greater insult to this ineffable Being, to say: "He
has made miserable men without being able to dispense with them, or He
has made them for His pleasure?"

Many sects represent Him as cruel; others, for fear of admitting a
wicked God, have the audacity to deny His existence. Is it not better to
say that probably the necessity of His nature and the necessity of
things have determined everything?

The world is the theatre of moral ill and physical ill; one is only too
aware of it: and the "All is good" of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke and Pope,
is only a witty paradox, a poor joke.

The two principles of Zarathustra and Manes, so carefully scrutinized by
Bayle, are a still poorer joke. They are, as has been observed already,
Moliere's two doctors, one of whom says to the other: "Grant me the
emetic, and I will grant you the bleeding." Manichaeism is absurd; and
that is why it has had so many supporters.

I admit that I have not been enlightened by all that Bayle says about
the Manichaeans and the Paulicians. That is controversy; I would have
preferred pure philosophy. Why discuss our mysteries beside
Zarathustra's? As soon as you dare to treat of our mysteries, which need
only faith and no reasoning, you open precipices for yourself.

The trash in our scholastic theology has nothing to do with the trash in
Zarathustra's reveries.

Why debate original sin with Zarathustra? There was never any question
of it save in St. Augustine's time. Neither Zarathustra nor any
legislator of antiquity had ever heard speak of i