Sublime

"So I have murdered Sibyl Vane,"

I love this sentence by the anonymous fourteenth-century English mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing: “It is not what you are nor what you have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.”

‘Socrates is an evil-doer, and a curious person,

But in fact nobody does deny that a person should be allowed some sort of release from a homicidal maniac. The most extreme school of orthodoxy only maintains that anybody who has had that experience should be content with that release.

L’excès du plaisir est nuisible ; dans la vertu pas d'excès à craindre : car elle est par elle-même la modération. Ce n'est pas un bien qu'une chose qui souffre de son propre accroissement.

Le jour où le plaisir deviendrait son maître, la douleur le serait aussi.

Tolstoï, Léon. La Sonate à Kreutzer, Paris : Folio, 1974.

"This was then the reward of my benevolence! I had saved a human being from destruction, and as a recompense I now writhed under the miserable pain of a wound which shattered the flesh and bone. The feelings of kindness and gentleness which I had entertained but a few moments before gave place to hellish rage and gnashing of teeth. Inflamed by