I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.

Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his health.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.

It is with literature as with law or empire - an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.

I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.

It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.