Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird and horror fiction, who is known for his creation of what became the Cthulhu Mythos. These H. P. Lovecraft quotes will inspire you.
Best H. P. Lovecraft Quotes
- “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents… some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “Our brains deliberately make us forget things, to prevent insanity” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
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“I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
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“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
- “For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
- “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
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“As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
- “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
- “Life is a hideous thing.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
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“Never Explain Anything” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
- “I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
- “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
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“Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
- “Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “The greatest human achievements have never been for profit.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
- “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
- “Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that is seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilized cynic to do other than to worship it.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
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“Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “I like coffee exceedingly.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
- “We love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and we don’t give a damn whether they or we are superior or inferior! They’re confounded pretty, and that’s all we know and all we need to know!” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
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“Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups – (a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “incurable lover of the grotesque” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
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“I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would set aside all the intellectual progress of years, and plunge us back into the darkness of mediaeval disbelief.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “Do not call up any that you can not put down.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
- “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.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
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“Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “Someday our piecing together of knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas we shall either go mad or flee into the safety of a new dark age.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
- “Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
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“Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “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
- “Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
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“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “The most merciful thing in the world… is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” ~ 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
- “Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
