31 May 1981 diary entry (pg. 248 of Herzog's book Conquest of the Useless)
Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 103
Source: Lectures on Philosophy (1959), p. 76
Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)
Letter to August Derleth (25 December 1930), quoted in ""H.P. Lovecraft, a Life"" by S.T. Joshi, p. 584
Non-Fiction, Letters, to August Derleth
Context: I am perfectly confident that I could never adequately convey to any other human being the precise reasons why I continue to refrain from suicide—the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthensome quality. These reasons are strongly linked with architecture, scenery, and lighting and atmospheric effects, and take the form of vague impressions of adventurous expectancy coupled with elusive memory—impressions that certain vistas, particularly those associated with sunsets, are avenues of approach to spheres or conditions of wholly undefined delights and freedoms which I have known in the past and have a slender possibility of knowing again in the future. Just what those delights and freedoms are, or even what they approximately resemble, I could not concretely imagine to save my life; save that they seem to concern some ethereal quality of indefinite expansion and mobility, and of a heightened perception which shall make all forms and combinations of beauty simultaneously visible to me, and realisable by me. I might add, though, that they invariably imply a total defeat of the laws of time, space, matter, and energy—or rather, an individual independence of these laws on my part, whereby I can sail through the varied universes of space-time as an invisible vapour might … upsetting none of them, yet superior to their limitations and local forms of material organisation. … Now this all sounds damn foolish to anybody else—and very justly so. There is no reason why it should sound anything except damn foolish to anyone who had not happened to receive precisely the same series of inclinations, impressions, and background-images which the purely fortuitous circumstances of my own especial life have chanced to give me.
Source: A World Waiting to Be Born: Civility Rediscovered
Thus It Is, 1989, p. 151
As of a Trumpet, On Eagle's Wings, Thus It Is
1960, Speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association
Context: But let me say, with respect to other countries, that I am wholly opposed to the state being used by any religious group, Catholic or Protestant, to compel, prohibit, or persecute the free exercise of any other religion. And I hope that you and I condemn with equal fervor those nations which deny their Presidency to Protestants and those which deny it to Catholics.
