"I have a profound conviction that the world is a species of gigantic jest—a jest of the most elaborate and stupendous—of the most complicated and august—and of the most utterly incomprehensible charac…"

"I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down."

"I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things."

"I have... for the metaphysical poets [William Wordsworth, etc.], as poets, the most sovereign contempt. That they have followers proves nothing."

"I have a very strong opinion that the world is a madhouse, and I am one of the inmates."