He ignored that, beginning to suspect his mind of harboring an alien. Once he might have termed it conscience. Now it was only an annoyance. Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic.

I have sometimes half believed, although the suspicion is mortifying, that there is only one step between his state who deeply indulges in imaginative meditation, and insanity.

I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy.

within every sane mind there was a trace of insanity, and within the depths of madness glimmered a seed of lucidity.

This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver.

"Deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code."

The Sinister Spirit sneered: 'It had to be!'
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, 'Why?

After my talk, he went into some kind of rant about how the “odd human case” didn’t mean much of anything and that it was sort of a bizarre consequence of prior epilepsy, etcetera.

If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.

"For somewhere in the back of my mind is that odd explanation that if you whisper a sentence in the ear of one person around a table of many - a short sentence such as "John slept close to a woman with whom he worked" - as those words go around the table, whispered to each person next to another, it might come out, less than a minute later, that John was a sleep-arounder, and he did it with every woman he knew; which meant he probably was gay, because he needed to give the impression of being a raging heterosexual.

Now, if that could happen in one minute, think of the long history of most faiths."

It was true, however, that he sometimes startled his hearers by things which might have been considered to border on coarseness if they had not been said by a clergyman.

when a moral sense begins to rot it is worse than when you had none.

I'm not so sure he's mad, Father. Just a little devious in his sanity.

"Mademoiselle is a fairy," he said, whispering mysteriously.