Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird fiction and horror fiction, who is known for his creation of what became the Cthulhu Mythos. Profoundly inspirational H. P. Lovecraft quotes will make you look at life differently and help you live a meaningful life.
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Famous H. P. Lovecraft Quotes
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
An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. – 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
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
Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone-I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise. – H. P. Lovecraft
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. – H. P. Lovecraft
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
The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth’s gods. – H. P. Lovecraft
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
My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight, and at most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but sometimes in the autumn, about two in the morning when winds and animals howl dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths below a damnable suggestions of rhythmical throbbing … and I feel that the transition of Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed. – 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
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
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises. – H. P. Lovecraft
Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. – H. P. Lovecraft
Life is not the unique property of Earth. Nor is life in the shape of human beings. Life takes many forms on other planets and far stars, forms that would seem bizarre to humans, as human life is bizarre to other life-forms. – H. P. Lovecraft
Heaven knows where I’ll end up – but it’s a safe bet that I’ll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be. – 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
There were nameless horrors abroad; and no matter how little one might be able to get at them, one ought tp stand prepared for any sort of action at any time. – H. P. Lovecraft
Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. – 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
In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,But all the sadder tums, the more he knows! – H. P. Lovecraft
I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government–but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops. – H. P. Lovecraft
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
In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively considered, and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown. – H. P. Lovecraft
Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life. – H. P. Lovecraft
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
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time. – 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
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
There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. – 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
Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal – 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 know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. – H. P. Lovecraft
I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. – 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
Truly, there are terrible primal arcana of earth which had better be left unknown and unevoked; dread secrets which have nothing to do with man, and which man may learn only in exchange for peace and sanity; cryptic truths which make the knower evermore an alien among his kind, and cause him to walk alone on earth. – H. P. Lovecraft
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
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
Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. – 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
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
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
Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects. – 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
I could not help feeling that they were evil things — mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. – H. P. Lovecraft
In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming – H. P. Lovecraft
Our brains deliberately make us forget things, to prevent insanity – H. P. Lovecraft
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
I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake–whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain. – H. P. Lovecraft
Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied, thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities. – H. P. Lovecraft
West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. – H. P. Lovecraft
I could not write about ordinary people because I am not in the least interested in them. – H. P. Lovecraft
There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression. – H. P. Lovecraft
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
Incurable lover of the grotesque. – H. P. Lovecraft
Two widely dissimilar races, whether equal or not, cannot peaceably coexist in the same territory until they are either uniformly mongrelised or cast in folkways of permanent and traditional personal aloofness. – H. P. Lovecraft
I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness. – H. P. Lovecraft
Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat – especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral. – H. P. Lovecraft
The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman. – H. P. Lovecraft
The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them. – H. P. Lovecraft
No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace. – H. P. Lovecraft
To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth. – H. P. Lovecraft
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
Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities. – H. P. Lovecraft
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
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
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. – H. P. Lovecraft
Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you. – H. P. Lovecraft
It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is – since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. – H. P. Lovecraft
The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind. – H. P. Lovecraft
You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you ever moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shown you worlds that no other living men have seen? – H. P. Lovecraft
When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim’s body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. 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
I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit. – H. P. Lovecraft
One can’t write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror – for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them. – H. P. Lovecraft
Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent. – H. P. Lovecraft
The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure ‘Victorian fictions’. Only egotism exists. – H. P. Lovecraft
Vigorous let us be in attaining our ends, and mild in our method of attainment. – H. P. Lovecraft
For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming. – H. P. Lovecraft
There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls them just within our range. – H. P. Lovecraft
Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos. – H. P. Lovecraft
I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences. Our virile Teutonic ancestors did not think their wives unworthy to follow them into battle, or scorn to dream of winged Valkyries bearing them to Valhalla. – H. P. Lovecraft
Nothing matters, but it’s perhaps more comfortable to keep calm and not interfere with other people. – H. P. Lovecraft
In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. – H. P. Lovecraft
I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. – H. P. Lovecraft
I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me. – H. P. Lovecraft
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die. – 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
I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge. – H. P. Lovecraft
Man’s relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man’s relation to the cosmos–to the unknown–which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. – H. P. Lovecraft
Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. – H. P. Lovecraft
For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass. – 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
