You're sincere, but in order not to upset your views you avoid talking with people who think differently. You pick your thoughts from conversations with people like yourself, from books written by people like yourself. In physics they call it resonance. You start out with modest opinions, but they match and build each other up to a scale.

... some kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart from all our convictions.

... that maxim of Descartes: "Question everything!" Question everything!

After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?

Every human act can be disguised with a coating of gilt.

It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.