Life without God
 
Another passage from The Adolescent (pp. 55-56):
 
An exceptionally intelligent man once said that there's nothing more difficult than to answer the question, 'Why must one behave honorably?'.... I once went to school with a boy called Lambert who, when he was sixteen, told me that, when he inherited the money that was coming to him, his greatest joy would be to feed his dogs on meat and bread while poor children were starving to death or, when the poor had nothing to keep themselves warm with, he would buy up a whole woodstack, have it laid out in a field, and burn it. Well, that's how he felt about it. Now, tell me, what could I have answered that pure-blooded villain if he had asked me why he should behave generously? And this is especially true in our age, in which you have managed to change so many things for the worse. In our society today nothing is clear, gentleman. Since you deny God and deny saintly self-sacrifice, I want to know what blind, deaf, or dumb force of inertia could make me act against my own interest? You may argue that behaving reasonably in society is to my advantage. But what I consider all your reasonableness unreasonable, what if I find nothing so reasonable about your communal dormitories and phalansteries? What the hell do I care about all that and about the distant future when I have only one life to live here? Let me decide for myself what's to my advantage - it's much more fun that way, if nothing else. Why should I bother my head about what will happen to your mankind a thousand years from now if, according to your own theory, in any case I cannot be rewarded with love, future life, or even gratitude for my services? No, gentleman, if that's the case, I'd prefer in the most impolite way to live just for myself and let the rest go to hell!