Life is not the unique property of Earth. Nor is life in the shape of human beings. Life takes many forms on other planets and far stars, forms that would seem bizarre to humans, as human life is bizarre to other life-forms.
There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything.
The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect successions of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines.
Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.
Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.
In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.
As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.
I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.
There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.
If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.
From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.
I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism – religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.
There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.
To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest...
Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.
Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied, thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.