“I object most strongly to a personal immortality. Immortality! Wretched ideal. Infinite ennui — I die at the thought.”

A provocative youthful rejection of personal immortality on grounds of endless weariness · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

• Belief
• Eternity
• Mortality

“Personally I think them the finest prose I have met with outside Pater.”

Placing John Henry Newman's prose alongside Walter Pater at the summit of Dowson's literary admiration · Letter to Arthur Moore, May 1891, on Newman's writings

• Literature
• Reading
• Style

“This is a profound saying. Theism, Pantheism, Christianity, Positivism — they lie so close together that it is like splitting hairs to consider them apart. The vital issue is between optimism and pessimism.”

Showing the young Dowson framing belief chiefly through the opposition between hopeful and pessimistic views of existence · Marginalia on Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, c. 1889

• Belief
• Despair
• Thought