London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. A Study in Scarlet

The best of men choose to know the One above all else; It is the famous "Eternal" within mortal men. But the majority of men are complacent, like well-fed cattle. They revel in mud; like donkeys, they prefer chaff to gold. Fragments

It is a great folly to lose the inner man in order to gain the outer, that is, to give up the whole or the greater part of one's quiet, leisure, and independence for splendour, rank, pomp, titles and honours. Parerga and Paralipomena

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become. The Concept of Anxiety