"I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years…"

"That which you mistake for madness is but an overacuteness of the senses."

"If a poem hasn't ripped apart your soul, you haven't experienced poetry."

"I am a firm believer in the doctrine of original sin."

"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…"