It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation. - Robert Louis Stevenson

He was in that humour when a man will cut off his nose to spite his face

Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.

Ethics are my veiled mistress; I love them, but know not what they are.