“A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.”

“With a tough decision, the act of flipping a coin allows you to figure out which you really prefer, because as the coin is spinning, you find yourself slightly pulling for either heads or tails. No need to follow the coin’s outcome—choose the side your subconscious hoped fate would favor.”

“Lose your balance for a moment and there you go, the world flings you off its spinning surface and its not so easy to scramble back on.”

“In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities, but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good.”

“. . . for us there still exists a serene, unfathomable abyss in which God and the spirits dwell. The soul, in moments of ecstasy, often soars across it; poetry unveils it at times with childlike naivete; but science with its hammer and yardstick is often perched at the rim and may, in many cases, contribute nothing at all.”

“Empire as located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.”