Sublime

“Philosophy.” “Really?” she asked. “Really.” “Has that been”—trying not to laugh—“helpful to you?” “Inasmuch as it’s a study of how people ought to live, in theory, not at all,” I said. “But it’s useful in thinking about how people actually do behave, and why. Whether we really know what we think we know. How our minds trick us into forging false c

But he seemed to me to have either a strange reserve or a strange simplicity; to be fundamentally unfurnished with ‘ideas’. He had no beliefs nor hopes nor fears, – nothing but senses, appetites, and serenely luxurious tastes. As I watched him strolling about looking at his finger-nails, I often wondered whether he had anything that could properly

“I have not forgotten your questions about the woman you keep in the madhouse, Ramezay. I have said nothing on that subject during our last few dinners, but it has not been absent from my mind, you may be assured. Invariably I come back to the same answer: why do you worry? What good would it do you if I told you she is indeed a saint? I cannot mak

The demand that Paul has demanded is to live a life without knowing what its demands are; to live, in other words, a life of faith and grace and not of works. The one thing you need – your salvation through grace – is the one thing you cannot will or achieve: ‘God is subverting the very criteria by which one might judge worth.’ Anything created by

French philosopher Blaise Pascal rightly remarked that the soul’s nature is so important that one must have lost all feeling not to care about the issue.

Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krüll,

transgression