H. P. Lovecraft famous quotes

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Lying #May #Strange

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Fear #Halloween #Emotion

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Life #Trying #Followers

I am only about half alive a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me. However so many things do interest me, & interest me intensely, in science, history, philosophy, & literature; that I have never actually desired to die, or entertained any suicidal designs, as might be expected of one with so little kinship to the ordinary features of life.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Philosophy #Suicidal #Bored

I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Real #Flags #Enthusiasm

I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Men #Outsiders #Stranger

The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. That which is not known of does not trouble us, while an imagined but insubstantial peril does not harm us. To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Reality #Thinking #Ignorant

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Dream #Men #Cities

Man is an essentially superstitious and fearful animal. Take away the herd's Christian gods and saints and they will without failing come to worship...something else.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Christian #Animal #Men

I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Dream #Business #Men

Some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze andstone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horsesalong the edges of thick forests, and then we know that we have looked backthrough the ivory gates into that world of wonder that was ours, before we were wise and unhappy.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Wise #Dream #Hero

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Night #World #Edge Of The World

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Dream #Real #Differences

The very fact that religions are not content to stand on their own feet, but insist on crippling or warping the flexible minds of children in their favour, forms a sufficient proof that there is no truth in them. If there were any truth in religion, it would be even more acceptable to a mature mind than to an infant mind--yet no mature mind ever accepts religion unless it has been crippled in infancy.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Children #Feet #Mind

What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Men #Doe #World

I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Men #Talking #Religion

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Sleep #Dark #Safety

Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loossed upon the world.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Brain #World #Horror

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Ocean #Book #Men

Do not call up that which you cannot put down.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Dream #Stars #Sleep

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises...
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Justice #Noise #Madness

All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Law #Cosmos #Fundamentals

If we were sensible we would seek death--the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Blank #Sensible

Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Memories #Reality #Possibility

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Black #Fascination #Form

The sea can bind us to her many moods, whispering to us by the subtle token of a shadow or a gleam upon the waves, and hinting in these ways of her mournfulness or rejoicing. Always she is remembering old things, and these memories, though we may not grasp them, are imparted to us, so that we share her gaiety or remorse.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Memories #Sea #Old Things

I like coffee exceedingly...
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Coffee

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Dream #Memories #Ocean

Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Inspirational #Life #Creative

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Writing #Drug #Tonight

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#World #Comic #Mankind

A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Powerful #Writing #Style

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#May #Ends

For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming...
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Dream #Dreamer

Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. (Dreams In The Witch-House)
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Dream #Reality #House

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Inspiration #Writing #Night

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Religious #Strong #Dark

No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Horror #Torture #Terrible

Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Wise #Dream #Men

As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Agony #Scales #Existence

The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Space #Unseen #Serene

Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else...
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Christian #Animal #Saint

Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Inspirational #Life #Unexpected

In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Men #Church #Bells

I'll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into - something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#People #Age #Able

All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me ...
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Black #Want #Infinite

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Memories #Sometimes

More wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of the ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days I have watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and time.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Beach #Book #Ocean

It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Cat #Existence #Cynic

I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Couple #Tired #World

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Ignorance #Thinking #Sea

I have looked upon all the universe has to hold of horror,and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Summer #Spring #Flower

We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Dog #Cat #Dark

That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Memories #Real #Artist

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Strange #Horror #Searchers

It is good to be a cynic it is better to be a contented cat and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Suicide #Cat #Dark

I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Shadow #World #Madness

I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Clouds #Long #Evil

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Fear #Emotion #Mankind

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Artist #Broken #Able

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Irony #Horror #Absent

Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Song #Journey #Toil

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Depressing #Joy #Scientist

The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Happiness #Success #Mind

If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Inspirational #Life #Men

Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Dog #Horse #Mistake

If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Fire #Taste #England

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Dream #Keys #Thirty

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Dream #Poet #Tales

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Real #Writing #Artist

In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Dream #Garden #Littles

Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Ocean #White #Blue

All great humorists are sad.... I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest--the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#World #Helping #Comic

To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest..
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Letting Go #Sea #Personality

There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Fields #Aptitude #Composition

With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Lying #Hands #Stronger

There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Men #Evil #Soul

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Atheist #Psychosis #Atheism

I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Letting Go #Book #Sleep

There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Soul #Dare #Streets

The greatest human achievements have never been for profit.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Achievement #Profit #Humans

As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, [and] steel their emotions against decent human sympathy.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Eye #Idlers #Lucky

Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.
-- H. P. Lovecraft

#Lying #Father #Thinking