Arthur Machen Quotes

Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery.

We lead two lives, and the half of our soul is madness, and half heaven is lit by a black sun. I say I am a man, is the other that hides in me?

I dream in fire but work in clay.

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

In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.

Old stories often turn out to be true.

If a man dreams that he has committed a sin before which the sun hid his face, it is often safe to conjecture that, in sheer forgetfulness, he wore a red tie, or brown boots with evening dress.

There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the newspaper.

silence is not weakness and decency is not pride

The saint endeavors to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall.

Now, everybody, I suppose, is aware that in recent years the silly business of divination by dreams has ceased to be a joke and has become a very serious science.

For, usually and fitly, the presence of an introduction is held to imply that there is something of consequence and importance to be introduced.

And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray's Inn Road will never find these secrets elsewhere.