61 Quotes by Arthur Machen

We have just begun to navigate a strange region; we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils.

We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.

I dream in fire but work in clay.

Darnell had received what is called a sound commercial education, and would therefore have found very great difficulty in putting into articulate speech any thought that was worth thinking;

It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.

silence is not weakness and decency is not pride

There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.

I think you are falling into the very general error of confining the spiritual world to the supremely good; but the supremely wicked, necessarily, have their portion in it. The merely carnal, sensual man can no more be a great sinner than he can be a great saint. Most of us are just indifferent, mixed-up creatures; we muddle through the world without realizing the meaning and the inner sense of things, and consequently, our wickedness and our goodness are alike second-rate, unimportant.

If Roberts had been a poet or a painter or a musician; we might have had a masterpiece. As he was neither: we had a monster