For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural horror provides an interesting field.
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.
Nothing matters, but it’s perhaps more comfortable to keep calm and not interfere with other people.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.
I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.
I am disillusioned enough to know that no man’s opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he’s talking about.
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.
Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming...
I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world’s beauty, is everything!
I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.
I could not write about “ordinary people” because I am not in the least interested in them.