The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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_The instinctive hatred of reality_ is the outcome of an extreme susceptibility to pain and to irritation, which can no longer endure to be “touched” at all, because every sensation strikes too deep. _The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, of all hostility, of all boundaries and distances in feeling,_ is the outcome of an extreme susceptibility to pain and to irritation, which regards all resistance, all compulsory resistance as insufferable _anguish_(—that is to say, as harmful, as _deprecated_ by the self-preservative instinct), and which knows blessedness (happiness) only when it is no longer obliged to offer resistance to anybody, either evil or detrimental,—love as the Only ultimate possibility of life.... These are the two _physiological realities_ upon which and out of which the doctrine of salvation has grown. I call them a sublime further development of hedonism, upon a thoroughly morbid soil. Epicureanism, the pagan theory of salvation, even though it possessed a large proportion of Greek vitality and nervous energy, remains the most closely related to the above. Epicurus was a _typical_ decadent: and I was the first to recognise him as such.—The terror of pain, even of infinitely slight pain—such a state cannot possibly help culminating in a _religion_ of love....
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.