He was fond of them and, with his fundamental human vanity, unable to resist the easy pleasure of exercising his mental superiority to their dumbfounded amazement.

Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

Consider also:

  1. “He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species.”
  2. “as might be expecteced in a Religion where Theology and Pneumatology play no part, Ethics takes in it the foremost place”
  3. “The towers, dead at the top, lacked the guidance of enlightened, purified souls”
  4. “But in this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous, and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry, and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved. An algebra too unstable properly to be computed, it is human-shaped and god-shaped, not pure and mathematical.”
  5. Transit to Scorpio