Life & Wisdom Quote by Algernon H. Blackwood

Blackwood’s line lands like a cold draft under the door: what lasts, he suggests, isn’t virtue but heat. “Pictures that persist” is doing double duty. It’s the literal image a storyteller plants in the reader’s mind, and the moral afterimage a person leaves behind in the world. Either way, persistence belongs to “wicked passions,” because wickedness is decisive. It wants something, and it acts with a clarity that goodness rarely matches.

The barb is in “alone seem strong enough.” Blackwood isn’t praising evil; he’s diagnosing an asymmetry of energy. The good, “ever too luke-warm,” don’t commit themselves with the same force. Lukewarm is a lethal word: not “weak” or “kind,” but tepid, comfortable, self-satisfied. It echoes religious scorn for half-faith and half-virtue, implying that moral niceness can be a kind of cowardice, or at least a failure of imagination.

Context matters: Blackwood wrote in an era when supernatural fiction was becoming a laboratory for psychology. His hauntings often feel less like external monsters and more like the pressure of repressed desire, guilt, obsession. In that world, “wicked passions” are narratively efficient: they rupture the everyday, they produce consequences, they generate symbols. A saint can be admirable; a villain is memorable.

The subtext is unflattering to readers, too. We claim to want goodness, but we canonize intensity. Culture preserves the dramatic stain better than the faint glow, and Blackwood is daring us to notice how much our appetite for darkness helps it endure.