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One’s strategy in trying to defend or to attack the claim that God exists obviously depends on what is meant by “God.” It may be objected that it is not so difficult to isolate what might be called the popular conception of God. The problem of suffering is of crucial importance because it shows that the God of popular theism does not exist.

— Walter Kaufmann The Faith of a Heretic (1963)

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Pain

More quotes by Walter Kaufmann

The most obvious failure of organized religions is surely that almost all of them have made a mockery of what their founders taught.

The Faith of a Heretic (1961)

Faith means intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.

The Faith of a Heretic (1961)

Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium.

The Faith of a Heretic (1959)

Faith means not wanting to know what is true.

paraphrasing Nietzsche, The Faith of a Heretic (1961)

The notion that only what is new and young is beautiful poisons our relationship to the past and to our own future.

Time is an Artist (1978)

All Walter Kaufmann quotes →

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A portion of life, every moment gets torn out of me hurting, and flees away.

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Knowledge by suffering entereth,
And life is perfected by death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poems (1844)

If everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?

Octavia Butler Parable of the Sower (1993)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Walter Kaufmann (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.