Our brains deliberately make us forget things, to prevent insanity
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown
I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents… some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.
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.
No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, [and] steel their emotions against decent human sympathy.
The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.
The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. That which is not known of does not trouble us, while an imagined but insubstantial peril does not harm us. To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden.
I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.
The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming.
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.
Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that is seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilized cynic to do other than to worship it.
Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.
Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.
The very fact that religions are not content to stand on their own feet, but insist on crippling or warping the flexible minds of children in their favour, forms a sufficient proof that there is no truth in them. If there were any truth in religion, it would be even more acceptable to a mature mind than to an infant mind–yet no mature mind ever accepts religion unless it has been crippled in infancy.
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.
Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.
