top of page

Melmoth the Wanderer

Charles Robert Maturin

Top 10 Best Quotes

“There is no error more absurd, and yet more rooted in the heart of man, than the belief that his sufferings will promote his spiritual safety.”

“Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion.”

“It is actually possible to become amateurs in suffering.”

“A mirth which is not gaiety is often the mask which hides the convulsed and distorted features of agony--and laughter, which never yet was the expression of rapture, has often been the only intelligible language of madness and misery. Ecstasy only smiles--despair laughs.”

“Let those who smile at me, ask themselves whether they have been indebted most to imagination or reality for all they have enjoyed in life, if indeed they have ever enjoyed any thing.”

“Many a month of gloomy unconsciousness rolled over me, without date or notice. One thousand waves may welter over a sunk wreck, and be felt as one.”

“Hypocrisy is said to be the homage that vice pays to virtue,—decorum is the outward expression of that homage; and if this be so, we must acknowledge that vice has latterly grown very humble indeed.”

“It is better to hear the thunder than to watch the cloud.”

“This voice of heaven thrilled us,–we seemed the pioneers of darkness, on the very frontiers of hell.”

“Terror is very fond of associations; we love to connect the agitation of the elements with the agitated life of man; and never did a blast roar, or a gleam of lightning flash, that was not connected in the imagination of some one, with a calamity that was to be dreaded, deprecated, or endured,–with the fate of the living, or the destination of the dead. The”

Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves as promotional material only. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.

Book Keywords:

virtue, derision, suffering, hypocrisy, fantasy, imagination, inspirational, vice, escapism, sadism, spirituality, sorrow

bottom of page