Top 30 Arthur Machen Quotes
#1. Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.
Arthur Machen
#2. Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world. I have often felt that; when the ascent of a long hill brought me to the summit of an undiscovered height in London; and I looked down on a new land.
Arthur Machen
#3. In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.
Arthur Machen
#4. For, usually and fitly, the presence of an introduction is held to imply that there is something of consequence and importance to be introduced.
Arthur Machen
#5. 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?
Arthur Machen
#6. It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.
Arthur Machen
#7. He knew then how the dull flesh of man can be like fire
Arthur Machen
#8. We have just begun to navigate a strange region; we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils.
Arthur Machen
#9. 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;
Arthur Machen
#10. 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.
Arthur Machen
#11. I cared nothing; my point of view in that instance, as in all others like it, was, that if the paper chose to send an outsider and an ignoramus to criticise works of art - especially the works of a new and tentative and experimental school - then, on the head of the paper let the just doom fall.
Arthur Machen
#13. He loved to meditate on a land laid waste, Britain deserted by the legions, the rare pavements riven by frost, Celtic magic still brooding on the wild hills and in the black depths of the forest, the rosy marbles stained with rain, and the walls growing grey.
Arthur Machen
#14. Then you may have sheer clotted nonsense; I once chased Julius Caesar all over London to get his recipe for curried eggs.
Arthur Machen
#15. Silence is not weakness and decency is not pride
Arthur Machen
#16. But he recognized that the illusions of the child only differed from those of the man in that they were more picturesque; belief in fairies and belief in the Stock Exchange as bestowers of happiness were equally vain, but the latter form of faith was ugly as well as inept.
Arthur Machen
#17. 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.
Arthur Machen
#18. Here then is the pattern in my carpet, the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes.
Arthur Machen
#19. It is all nonsense, to be sure; and so much the greater nonsense inasmuch as the true interpretation of many dreams - not by any means of all dreams - moves, it may be said, in the opposite direction to the method of psycho-analysis.
Arthur Machen
#20. 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 ...
Arthur Machen
#21. But it was dreadful to think of Henry, slowly or swiftly corrupted by his detestable father and mother, growing up with the fat slime of their abominations upon him.
Arthur Machen
#22. This then was English fiction, this was English criticism, and farce, after all, was but an ill-played tragedy.
Arthur Machen
#24. And let me tell you this: our higher senses are blunted. We are so drenched with material sin, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness if we encountered it
Arthur Machen
#25. There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the newspaper.
Arthur Machen
#26. Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery.
Arthur Machen
#27. 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.
Arthur Machen
#28. 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.
Arthur Machen
#29. I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul, Austin, the man's outward form remained, but all hell was within it.
Arthur Machen
#30. The woods hung dark on the hills; above, the sky violet, specked with minute feathery clouds, white as snowflakes.
Arthur Machen
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