all mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be

all the habits of the patient, both mentally and bodily, are still in our favour.

keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which hell affords.

once you have made the world an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.

i gather that the middle-aged couple who called at his office are just the sort of people we want him to know-rich, smart, superficially intellectual, and brightly sceptical about everything in the world.