“What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.”

“For he used to say...that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.”

“He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.”

“Mere knowledge of human psychology would in itself infallibly make us despondent if we were not cheered and kept alert by the satisfaction of expressing it.”

“But what would be our readers’ reaction if we simply refused to get to the bottom of that question?”

“We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.”

“But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar? That was to say: they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death.”