Let us now shrink from parodying Hegel, and state that for our patrician ‘the romantic is the real, the real the romantic’. - R. W. K. Paterson

Sceptics often make much of the alleged mysteriousness of values—by which, however, they mean little more than that they are claimed to be essentially different from all classes of physical objects and properties, mental states and properties, historical facts, mathematical theorems, scientific concepts, or whatever. In other words, their objection is simply that values are claimed to be of their nature different everything which is not of its nature a value.

A world in to whose settled meaning he [the egoist] had committed himself would be a world to which he had alienated himself. His self-possession would be at an end, for the world which he had begun by possessing would at last have come to possess him.

Our ridicule and disgust are in the end aimed at some unavowed part of our own selves.