"[Chantal to Fiodor:] "It seems to me that evil is much less complicated than you would like to believe. Here or anywh…"

"God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best."

"For temptation is like the birth of another man inside a man, a horrible extension of himself. He drags this weight i…"

"There is no mask that temptation cannot wear, and the idea that Satan is purely a logician is an illusion held by not…"

"The contradictions in Renan, his feminine sensibility, coquetry, unavowed egotism, and sudden emotional outbursts, al…"

"More often than not, nothingness is reluctantly and despairingly taken to be the only hypothesis possible when all th…"

"[P]ride has no intrinsic substance, being no more than the name given to the soul devouring itself. When that loathso…"

"He [Abbé Cénabre] had often reflected on the plight of even the most illustrious of those renegades who finish up eng…"

"[T]here is nothing that God hates so much as a liar."

"Once or twice, when she [Chantal] had adroitly avoided an opportunity of pleasing or winning admiration (for her shre…"