“Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness.”

— Anne Louise Germaine de Staël , book Corinne

Bk. 10, ch. 5
Corinne (1807)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness." by Anne Louise Germaine de Staël?

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël 42

Swiss author 1766–1817

Related quotes

“Love… no such thing.

Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist.

Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Source: A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. book Strength to Love

Source: Strength to Love

“You’re selfish and you’re cold, and I’m tired of getting frostbite when I touch you. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

“As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.”

H.P. Lovecraft book To Quebec and the Stars

"Nietzscheism and Realism" from The Rainbow, Vol. I, No. 1 (October 1921); reprinted in "To Quebec and the Stars", and also in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 70
Non-Fiction
Context: It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients—or their lack—and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws. We call a thing "good" because it promotes certain petty human conditions that we happen to like—whereas it is just as sensible to assume that all humanity is a noxious pest and should be eradicated like rats or gnats for the good of the planet or of the universe. There are no absolute values in the whole blind tragedy of mechanistic nature—nothing is good or bad except as judged from an absurdly limited point of view. The only cosmic reality is mindless, undeviating fate—automatic, unmoral, uncalculating inevitability. As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence. That plan is most deserving of praise which most ably fosters the creation of the objects and conditions best adapted to diminish the pain of living for those most sensitive to its depressing ravages. To expect perfect adjustment and happiness is absurdly unscientific and unphilosophical. We can seek only a more or less trivial mitigation of suffering. I believe in an aristocracy, because I deem it the only agency for the creation of those refinements which make life endurable for the human animal of high organisation.

“All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

“Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Emmett F. Fields, in "Atheism : An Affirmative View" (1980) http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/emmett_fields/affirmative_atheism.html
Misattributed