Any but the most brutish of men must be touched with a certain awe or wonder at the baring of a woman’s naked soul.
Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.
Man is still an ape in that he forgets what is not ever before his eyes.
I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.
What is death but a traversing of eternities and a crossing of cosmic oceans?
Man can be that which he wishes to be; form and substance, they are but shadows. The mind, the ego, the essence of the god-dream – that is real, that is immortal.
Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.
I think the real reason so many youngsters are clamoring for freedom of some vague sort, is because of unrest and dissatisfaction with present conditions; I don’t believe this machine age gives full satisfaction in a spiritual way, if the term may be allowed.
Rome got some peachy pastings when she tried to lick the Irish.
Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph.
Before the invader sound was born, the Universe was silent and shall be again.
I never saw a man fight as Conan fought. He put his back to the courtyard wall, and before they overpowered him the dead men were strewn in heaps thigh-deep about him. But at last they dragged him down, a hundred against one.
It was no ape, neither was it a man. It was some shambling horror spawned in the mysterious, nameless jungles of the south, where strange life teemed in the reeking rot without the dominance of man, and drums thundered in temples that had never known the tread of a human foot.
I’m not going out of my way looking for devils; but I wouldn’t step out of my path to let one go by.
How can I wear the harness of toil And sweat at the daily round, While in my soul forever The drums of Pictdom sound?
Aye, you white dog, you are like all your race; but to a black man gold can never pay for blood.
Man is better without knowledge of things to come, for what is to be will be, and man can neither avert nor hasten. It is better to go in the dark when the road must pass a lion and there is no other road.
It is an ill thing to meet a man you thought dead in the woodland at dusk.
It is not pleasant to come upon Death in a lonely place at midnight.
Life is but a web spun of ghosts and dreams and illusions.