How we cite our quotes: All quotations are from No Country for Old Men.
Quote #7
"It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job."
Sheriff Bell isn't afraid of dying, as he makes perfectly clear when he walks into a crime scene expecting to be confronted by the psychotic Anton Chigurh. It's his soul he's worried about—and humanity as a whole. That's something that'll keep you up at night.
Quote #8
"But I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard."
Sheriff Bell isn't worried about dying. He's worried about committing himself to a certain type of faith only to find out that the world is just a big tangle of random violence. Notice all the language of gambling here? ("Chips" are what you bet in card games; "hazard" actually comes from the name of a game of chance.) You could definitely make the argument that Bell and Chigurh are both trying to figure out whether they believe that the world is really just a game of chance.
Quote #9
"You need to call it. I can't call it for you or it wouldn't be fair."
Anton Chigurh might be a psycho killer, but he still believes in some kind of fairness when it comes to judging whether people should live or die. Fairness—or some twisted kind of fairness—is his only moral (and spiritual) code. In this case, he thinks it's "fair" if he lets his potential victim call heads or tails on a coin toss. We think it might be okay to let fairness slide just this once and not kill the poor lady, but, then, we live by no code.