Top 50 Arthur Machen Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

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

— Arthur Machen

3. “I dream in fire but work in clay.”

— Arthur Machen

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

— Arthur Machen

5. “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

6. “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

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

— Arthur Machen

8. “Old stories often turn out to be true.”

— Arthur Machen

9. “There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these ‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career,’ beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another’s eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.”

— Arthur Machen

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

— Arthur Machen

11. “The fancy that sensations are symbols and not realities hovered in his mind, and led him to speculate as to whether they could not actually be transmuted one into another.”

— Arthur Machen

12. “It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current.”

— Arthur Machen

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “All London was one grey temple of an awful rite, ring within ring of wizard stones circled about some central place, every circle was an initiation, every initiation eternal loss.”

— Arthur Machen

17. “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.”

— Arthur Machen

18. “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

19. “But so went forth Darnell, day by day, strangely mistaking death for life, madness for sanity, and purposeless and wandering phantoms for true beings. He was sincerely of opinion that he was a City clerk, living in Shephard’s Bush – having forgotten the mysteries and the far-shining glories of the kingdom which was his by legitimate inheritance.”

— Arthur Machen

20. “The adept could, in truth, change those who were obnoxious to him into harmless and unimportant shapes, not as in the letter of the old stories, by transforming the enemy, but by transforming himself. The magician puts men below him by going up higher, as one looks down on a mountain city from a loftier crag.”

— Arthur Machen

21. “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.”

— Arthur Machen

22. “Holiness requires as great, or almost as great, an effort; but holiness works on lines that were natural once; it is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in making this effort man becomes a demon.”

— Arthur Machen

23. “It was an interminable labor, and he had always known it to be as hopeless as alchemy. The gold, the great and glowing masterpiece, would never shine amongst the dead ashes and smoking efforts of the crucible, but in the course of the life, in the interval between the failures, he might possibly discover curious things.”

— Arthur Machen

24. “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

25. “He had always told her that there was only one existence, one science, one religion, that the external world was but a variegated shadow which might either conceal or reveal the truth; and now she believed. He had shewn her that bodily rapture might be the ritual and expression of the ineffable mysteries, of the world beyond sense, that must be entered by the way of sense; and now she believed.”

— Arthur Machen

26. “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

27. “This then was English fiction, this was English criticism, and farce, after all, was but an ill-played tragedy.”

— Arthur Machen

28. “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

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

— Arthur Machen

30. “The arts, then, are man’s difference, that which makes him to be what he is; and when he speaks through them he is using the utterance which is proper to him, as man. For, if we once set aside the “does it pay” nonsense, which is evidently nonsense and pestilent nonsense at that, we come clearly and freely to the truth that man is concerned with beauty, and with the ecstasy or rapture that proceeds from the creation of beauty and from the contemplation of it.”

— Arthur Machen

31. “He dived deeper and deeper into his books; he had taken all obsolescence to be his province; in his disgust at the stupid usual questions, “Will it pay?” “What good is it?” and so forth, he would only read what was uncouth and useless.”

— Arthur Machen

32. “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

33. “He could think nothing and do nothing after the common fashion of the world; even when he “went wrong,” he did so in a highly unusual and eccentric manner.”

— Arthur Machen

34. “I stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit; I saw the great empty deep stretch dim before me, and in that instant a bridge of light leapt from the earth to the unknown shore, and the abyss was spanned.”

— Arthur Machen

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “She had poisoned herself – in time.”

— Arthur Machen

40. “Though horror and revolting nausea rose up within me, and an odour of corruption choked my breath, I remained firm. I was then privileged or accursed, I dare not say which, to see that which was on the bed, lying there black like ink, transformed before my eyes.”

— Arthur Machen

41. “I could tell you certain things which would convince you, but you would never know a happy day again. You would pass the rest of your life, as I pass mine, a haunted man, a man who has seen hell.”

— Arthur Machen

42. “He hugged the thought that a great part of what he had invented was in the true sense of the word occult: page after page might have been read aloud to the uninitiated without betraying the inner meaning.”

— Arthur Machen

43. “So, day after day, he lived in the grey phantasmal world, akin to death, that has, somehow, with most of us, made good its claim to be called life.”

— Arthur Machen

44. “Happiness, said De Quincey, on his discovery of the paradise that he thought he had found in opium, could be sent down by the mail-coach; more truly I could announce my discovery that delight could be contained in small octavos and small type, in a bookshelf three feet long.”

— Arthur Machen

45. “And he drank, and the more he drank the more he longed to drink, because the wine was enchanted.”

— Arthur Machen

46. “By the mistaken benevolence of deceased relatives both young men were placed out of reach of hunger, and so, meditating high achievements, idled their time pleasantly away, and revelled in the careless joys of a Bohemianism devoid of the sharp reasoning of adversity.”

— Arthur Machen

47. “Here lay hidden the secret of the sensuous art of literature; it was the secret of suggestion, the art of causing delicious sensation by the use of words.”

— Arthur Machen

48. “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

49. “The idea of a man going about London haunted by the fear of meeting a young man with spectacles struck Dyson as supremely ridiculous;.”

— Arthur Machen

50. “To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odour of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line; this was the tale of the long evenings, of the candle flame white upon the paper and the eager pen.”

— Arthur Machen