211 Sourced Quotes
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 infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but 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 oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.
H. P. Lovecraft
The undesirability of any system of rule not tempered with the quality of kindness is obvious; for "kindness" is a complex collection of various impulses, reactions and realisations highly necessary to the smooth adjustment of botched and freakish creatures like most human beings. It is a weakness basically—or, in some cases, and ostentation of secure superiority—but its net effect is desirable; hence it is, on the whole, praiseworthy. Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects. Pessimism produces kindness. The disillusioned philosopher is even more tolerant than the priggish bourgeois idealist with his sentimental and extravagant notions of human dignity and destiny.
H. P. Lovecraft
I can look back... at two distinct periods of opinion whose foundations I have successively come to distrust—a period before 1919 or so, when the weight of classic authority unduly influenced me, and another period from 1919 to about 1925, when I placed too high a value on the elements of revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity.
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
I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.
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
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
H. P. Lovecraft
The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.
H. P. Lovecraft
As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.
H. P. Lovecraft
No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.
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
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.
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
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
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
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
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
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
No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it--and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law... are concerned.
H. P. Lovecraft
Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal
H. P. Lovecraft
Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace, And copies Ovid's filth without his grace. In his rough brain a genius might have grown, Had he not sought to play the brute alone; But void of shame, he let his wit run wild, And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child.
H. P. Lovecraft
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
Quote of the day
Remember also that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Ayn Rand
H. P. Lovecraft
Born: August 20, 1890
Died: March 15, 1937 (aged 46)
Bio: Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction.
Known for:
- The Call of Cthulhu (1928)
- At the Mountains of Madness (1936)
- The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936)
- The Dunwich Horror (1929)
Most used words:
- life
- gods
- man
- time
- cult
- earth
- human
- horror
- dark
- fear
- dreams
- black
- nature
- strange
- death
H. P. Lovecraft Quotes
H. P. Lovecraft Short Quotes
Quotes about H. P. Lovecraft
American Author Quotes
Author Quotes
19th-century Author Quotes
Related People
Edgar Allan Poe
American Author
Stephen King
American Author
Robert E. Howard
American Author
Clark Ashton Smith
American Author
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
- life
- love
- nature
- time
- god
- power
- human
- mind
- work
- art
- heart
- thought
- men
- day
