“There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.”

“As a retired clergyman, I'm still a priest. I have much more freedom than I had, but I haven't had much more free time.”

“Oswald Cabal: Little animals. And if we’re no more than animals, we must snatch each little scrap of happiness, and live, and suffer, and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this, or that. All the universe or nothing. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?”

“That clergyman soon becomes an object of contempt who being often asked out to dinner never refuses to go.”
Facile contemnitur clericus, qui saepe vocatus ad prandium, ire non recusat.

“The fate of animals is of far greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous.”

“Neither antiquity nor any other nation has imagined a more atrocious and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating God. — This is how Christians treat the autocrat of the universe.”

“Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?”

“Dying more like animals than human beings.”

“That which exercises reason is more excellent than that which does not exercise reason; there is nothing more excellent than the universe, therefore the universe exercises reason.”

“There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.”