The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.
All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum total of human happiness.
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.
Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience.
Fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions.
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!
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.
In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes, But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!
Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.
The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.
The cat . . . is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe.
The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.
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.
