“Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments without difficulty.”

“Kings can only use their best tools.”

“We have invented a moral sense which is rotting now that we can't give it employment, and when a moral sense begins to rot, it is worse than when you had none. I suppose that all endeavors which ar...”

“People will do the basest things on account of their so-called honor.”

“The increasingly cynical court thought Arthur, "hypocritical, as all decent men must be if you assume decency cannot exist.”

“It is generally the trustful and optimistic people who can afford to retreat. The loveless and faithless ones are compelled by their pessimism to attack.”

“But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.”

“I believe in fatalism, the positive one.”

“The same word passed through three minds, simultaneously, philosophical, fatalistic, the eternal refuge of the Italian: Pazienza....”

“The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. ...”

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.”

“This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?”

“The sins of women and children, domestic servants and the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the sins of the husbands and fathers, the masters, the strong and the rich and the educated.”

“I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.”

“Told often enough that they are the source of sin, women may well begin feeling guilty as they accept the necessity for penance. Taught effectively enough that they are irrelevant to the important ...”