Melmoth the Wanderer 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.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“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, Melmoth the Wanderer

“It is actually possible to become amateurs in suffering.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“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, Melmoth the Wanderer

“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, Melmoth the Wanderer

“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, Melmoth the Wanderer

“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, Melmoth the Wanderer

“This voice of heaven thrilled us,–we seemed the pioneers of darkness, on the very frontiers of hell.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“It is better to hear the thunder than to watch the cloud.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“Alas! it is better to wander in perpetual sterility than to be tortured with the remembrance of flowers that have withered”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“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”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“He possessed active, and I passive fortitude. Give him something to do, and he would do it at the risk of limb, and life, and soul,–he never murmured. Give me something to suffer, to undergo, to submit, and I became at once the hero of submission.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“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, Melmoth the Wanderer

“But (for Melmoth never could decide) was it in a dream or not, that he saw the figure of his ancestor appear at the door?–hesitatingly as he saw him at first on the night of his uncle's death,–saw him enter the room, approach his bed, and heard him whisper, 'You have burned me, then; but those are flames I can survive. I am alive, I am beside you.' Melmoth started, sprung from his bed,–it was broad day-light. He looked round,–there was no human being in the room but himself. He felt a slight pain in the wrist of his right arm. He looked at it, it was black and blue, as from the recent gripe of a strong hand.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“When we had proceeded for a considerable time, (at least so it appeared to me, for minutes are hours in the noctuary of terror,–terror has no diary),”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“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, Melmoth the Wanderer

“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, Melmoth the Wanderer

“Will you dare to say so?–Have you never erred?–Have you never felt one impure sensation?–Have you never indulged a transient feeling of hatred, or malice, or revenge?–Have you never forgot to do the good you ought to do,–or remembered to do the evil you ought not to have done?–Have you never in trade overreached a dealer, or banquetted on the spoils of your starving debtor?–Have you never, as you went to your daily devotions, cursed from your heart the wanderings of your heretical brethren,–and while you dipped your fingers in the holy water, hoped that every drop that touched your pores, would be visited on them in drops of brimstone and sulphur?–Have you never, as you beheld the famished, illiterate, degraded populace of your country, exulted in the wretched and temporary superiority your wealth has given you,–and felt that the wheels of your carriage would not roll less smoothly if the way was paved with the heads of your countrymen? Orthodox Catholic–old Christian–as you boast yourself to be,–is not this true?–and dare you say you have not been an agent of Satan? I tell you, whenever you indulge one brutal passion, one sordid desire, one impure imagination–whenever you uttered one word that wrung the heart, or embittered the spirit of your fellow-creature–whenever you made that hour pass in pain to whose flight you might have lent wings of down–whenever you have seen the tear, which your hand might have wiped away, fall uncaught, or forced it from an eye which would have smiled on you in light had you permitted it–whenever you have done this, you have been ten times more an agent of the enemy of man than all the wretches whom terror, enfeebled nerves, or visionary credulity, has forced into the confession of an incredible compact with the author of evil, and whose confession has consigned them to flames much more substantial than those the imagination of their persecutors pictured them doomed to for an eternity of suffering! Enemy of mankind!' the speaker continued,–'Alas! how absurdly is that title bestowed on the great angelic chief,–the morning star fallen from its sphere! What enemy has man so deadly as himself? If he would ask on whom he should bestow that title aright, let him smite his bosom, and his heart will answer,–Bestow it here!”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“Mine is the best theology, the theology of utter hostility to all beings whose sufferings may mitigate mine. In this flattering theory, your crimes become my virtues,–I need not any of my own. Guilty as I am of the crime that outrages nature, your crimes (the crimes of those who offend against the church) are of a much more heinous order. But your guilt is my exculpation, your sufferings are my triumph. I need not repent, I need not believe; if you suffer, I am saved,–that is enough for me. How glorious and easy it is to erect at once the trophy of our salvation, on the trampled and buried hopes of another's! How subtle and sublime that alchemy, that can convert the iron of another's contumacy and impenitence into the precious gold of your own redemption! I have literally worked out my salvation by your fear and trembling.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“What I mean — and I ought to know if any one does! — is that while most countries give, others take away. Egypt changes you. No one can live here and remain exactly what he was before.”
This puzzled me. It startled, too, again. His manner was so earnest. “And Egypt, you mean, is one of the countries that take away?” I asked. The strange idea unsettled my thoughts a little.
“First takes away from you,” he replied, “but in the end takes you away. Some lands enrich you,” he went on, seeing that I listened, “while others impoverish. From India, Greece, Italy, all ancient lands, you return with memories you can use. From Egypt you return with — nothing. Its splendour stupefies; it’s useless. There is a change in your inmost being, an emptiness, an unaccountable yearning, but you find nothing that can fill the lack you’re conscious of. Nothing comes to replace what has gone. You have been drained.’’
I stared; but I nodded a general acquiescence. Of a sensitive, artistic temperament this was certainly true, though by no means the superficial and generally accepted verdict. The majority imagine that Egypt has filled them to the brim. I took his deeper reading of the facts. I was aware of an odd fascination in his idea.
“Modern Egypt,” he continued, “is, after all, but a trick of civilisation,” and there was a kind of breathlessness in his measured tone, “but ancient Egypt lies waiting, hiding, underneath. Though dead, she is amazingly alive. And you feel her touching you. She takes from you. She enriches herself. You return from Egypt — less than you were before.”
What came over my mind is hard to say. Some touch of visionary imagination burned its flaming path across my mind. I thought of some old Grecian hero speaking of his delicious battle with the gods — battle in which he knew he must be worsted, but yet in which he delighted because at death his spirit would join their glorious company beyond this world. I was aware, that is to say, of resignation as well as resistance in him. He already felt the effortless peace which follows upon long, unequal battling, as of a man who has fought the rapids with a strain beyond his strength, then sinks back and goes with the awful mass of water smoothly and indifferently — over the quiet fall.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“The life of the happy is all hopes, - that of the unfortunate all memory.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“The sublime and yet softened beauty of the scenery around, had filled the soul of Stanton with delight, and he enjoyed that delight as Englishmen generally do, silently.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“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, Melmoth the Wanderer

“Singular sentiment of pride, that can erect its trophies amid the grave.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“Dans l’automne de l’année 1816, John Melmoth, élève du collège de la Trinité, à Dublin, suspendit momentanément ses études pour visiter un oncle mourant, et de qui dépendaient toutes ses espérances de fortune. John, qui avait perdu ses parents, était le fils d’un cadet de famille, dont la fortune médiocre suffisait à peine pour payer les frais de son éducation ; mais son oncle était vieux, célibataire et riche. Depuis sa plus tendre enfance, John avait appris, de tous ceux qui l’entouraient, à regarder cet oncle avec ce sentiment qui attire et repousse à la fois, ce respect mêlé du désir de plaire, que l’on éprouve pour l’être qui tient en quelque sorte en ses mains le fil de notre existence.”
― Charles Maturin, Melmoth, l'homme errant

“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.”
― Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“She was not only unable to make the least allowance for a divergence from this way, but utterly unable to conceive that another existed for those who believed in a God, or acknowledged human power at all. She was as much at a loss to conceive how any good could come out of that Nazareth of her abhorrence, as an ancient geographer would have been to have pointed out America in a classical map.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“You,—you!” he exclaimed, after a burst of sound that seemed rather like the convulsion of a demoniac, than the mirth, however frantic, of a human being—“you!—oh, there’s metal more attractive! Satan himself, however depraved, has a better taste than to crunch such a withered scrap of orthodoxy as you between his iron teeth. No!”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“It was not even the wish for that change of place that always flatters us with the change of circumstance, as if we did not carry our own hearts with us wherever we go and might not therefore be sure that an innate and eroding ulcer must be our companion from the Pole to the Equator.”
― Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer