The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.
The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.
The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.
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.
We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.
Adulthood is hell.
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!
Personally, I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.
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.
Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.
