H.P. Lovecraft Quotes
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 everyday life.
All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum total of human happiness.
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.
Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience.
Fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions.
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!
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
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.
In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes, But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!
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.
The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.
The cat . . . is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe.
The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.
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.
I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.
We are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.
Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes.
I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars. . . . I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness. . . .
I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!
For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance - or identity - were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.
Kids always think they're coming into a story at the beginning, when usually they're coming in at the end.
But of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets.
The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west.
Shall I compare thee to a Shoggoth?
It’s hard to have done all one’s growing up since 33 — but that’s a damn sight better than not growing up at all.
By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins.
It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.
I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel.
Success is a relative thing―and the victory of a boy at marbles is equal to the victory of an Octavius at Actium when measured by the scale of cosmic infinity.
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of ide
Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.
For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming...
Heaven knows where I'll end up - it's a safe bet I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
