Charles Robert Maturin Quotes & Sayings

A time will come, and soon, when, from mere habit, you will echo the scream of every delirious wretch that harbors near you; then you will pause, clasp your hands on your throbbing head, and listen with horrible anxiety whether the scream proceeded from you or them. — Charles Robert Maturin

He paused, I thought, like a man who is watching the effect of the terrors he excites, not from malignity but vanity, merely to magnify his own courage in encountering them. — Charles Robert Maturin

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. — Charles Robert Maturin

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. — Charles Robert Maturin

It is actually possible to become amateurs in suffering. — Charles Robert Maturin

Alas! it is too true that our souls always contract themselves on the approach of a blessing, and seem as if their powers, exhausted in the effort to obtain it, had no longer energy to embrace the object. — Charles Robert Maturin

It is better to hear the thunder than to watch the cloud. — Charles Robert Maturin

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. — Charles Robert Maturin

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. — Charles Robert Maturin

My own lov'd light,
That very soft and solemn spirit worships,
That lovers love so well
strange joy is thine,
Whose influence o'er all tides of soul hath power,
Who lend'st thy light to rapture and despair;
The glow of hope and wan hue of sick fancy
Alike reflect thy rays: alike thou lightest
The path of meeting or of parting love
Alike on mingling or on breaking hearts
Thou smil'st in throned beauty! — Charles Robert Maturin

A malady
Preys on my heart that med'cine cannot reach. — Charles Robert Maturin

Singular sentiment of pride, that can erect its trophies amid the grave. — Charles Robert Maturin

The soul shares not the body's test. — Charles Robert Maturin

The next moment I was chained to my chair again,
the fires were lit, the bells rang out, the litanies were sung;
my feet were scorched to a cinder,
my muscles cracked, my blood and marrow hissed, my flesh consumed like shrinking leather,
the bones of my legs hung two black withering and moveless sticks in the ascending blaze;
it ascended, caught my hair,
I was crowned with fire,
my head was a ball of molten metal, my eyes flashed and melted in their sockets;
I opened my mouth, it drank fire,
I closed it, the fire was within, ... and we burned, and burned! I was a cinder body and soul in my dream. — Charles Robert Maturin

The fountain of my heart dried up within me,
With nought that loved me, and with nought to love,
I stood upon the desert earth alone.
And in that deep and utter agony,
Though then, then even most unfit to die
I fell upon my knees and prayed for death. — Charles Robert Maturin

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude. — Charles Robert Maturin

When one fierce passion is devouring the soul, we feel more than ever the necessity of external excitement; and our dependence on the world for temporary relief increases in direct proportion to our contempt of the world and all its works. He — Charles Robert Maturin

They waste life in what are called good resolutions-partial efforts at reformation, feebly commenced, heartlessly conducted, and hopelessly concluded. — Charles Robert Maturin

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. — Charles Robert Maturin

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. — Charles Robert Maturin

When art assumes the omnipotence of reality, when we feel we suffer as much from an illusion as from truth, our sufferings lose all dignity and all consolation. We — Charles Robert Maturin

Tis well to be merry and wise,
'Tis well to be honest and true;
It is best to be off with the old love,
Before you are on with the new. — Charles Robert Maturin

The limner's art may trace the absent feature,
And give the eye of distant weeping faith
To view the form of its idolatry;
But oh! the scenes 'mid which they met and parted;
The thoughts
the recollections sweet and bitter,
Th' Elysian dreams of lovers, when they loved,
Who shall restore them? — Charles Robert Maturin

Beauty hath no lustre save when it gleameth through the crystal web that purity's fine fingers weave for it. — Charles Robert Maturin

O wretched is the dame, to whom the sound,
"Your lord will soon return," no phrase brings. — Charles Robert Maturin