H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fe...

Nothing is really typical of my efforts... I'm simply casting about for better ways to crystallise a...

I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelati...

Indeed, there is much in pure humanitarian culture, as opposed to rigid scientific training, which e...

The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any t...

The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmi...

A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by ...

The cool, lithe, cynical, and unconquered lord of the housetops.

There are so many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of the...

Art has been wrecked by a complete consciousness of the universe which shews that the world is to ea...

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

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. ...

Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in abso...

If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in o...

But of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hi...

For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming...

While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none th...

Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story c...

I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing,...

Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator...

That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the asser...

Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experien...

Of our relation to all creation we can never know anything whatsoever. All is immensity and chaos. B...

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation ...

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial confor...

That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear...

The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violati...

It’s hard to have done all one’s growing up since 33 — but that’s a damn sight better than not growi...

A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present;...

The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this--whether or not there be excited in the read...

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

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

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars...

In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

Have only this consolation--that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, stu...

It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can v...

No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of ide

Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which are known only to cats and which villagers sa...

Well did the traveler know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood of the Cerenerian Sea, and b...

Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight float up from the river to...

By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the river's edge and bear th...

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

I passed under an arch out of that region of slabs and columns, and wandered through the open countr...

So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in the ...

Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a mounta...

Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.

If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hi...

There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying c...

He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woo...

There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a p...

I'll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into - something of the age-old horrors ...

That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things...

For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance - or iden...

I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; ma...

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.

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

No breed of cats in its proper condition can by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as even...

Denied anything ardently desired, the individual or state will argue and parley just so long - then,...

I am not very proud of being an human being; in fact, I distinctly dislike the species in many ways....

All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum tot...

Man's respect for the imponderables varies according to his mental constitution and environment. Thr...

Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and...

For correct writing, the cultivation of patience and mental accuracy is essential. Throughout the yo...

Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically - following the second or narrative-...

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead cor...

Success is a relative thing―and the victory of a boy at marbles is equal to the victory of an Octavi...

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all i...

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a p...

The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west.

He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers h...

I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thou...

May the merciful god, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug ...

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath...

As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow, I knew that I had at last pr...

It is no longer necessary to preach sonorously of the sinful and deleterious effect of liquor on the...

There is in certain ancient things a traceOf some dim essence --More than form or weight;A tenuous a...

To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchan...

It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is ...

Tales of ordinary characters would appeal to a larger class , but I have no wish to make such an app...

Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours...

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all i...

As we drew nearer the green shore the bearded man told me of that land, the Land of Zar, where dwell...

I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined ...

An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and th...

Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.

I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat ...

A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the ev...

Now all my tales are based on the fundemental premise that common human laws and interests and emoti...

Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will ...

The cloudless day is richer at its close;A golden glory settles on the lea;Soft, stealing shadows hi...

You have been my friend in the cosmos; you have been my only friend on this planet - the only soul t...

I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel.

Only a cynic can create horror--for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demon...

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate...

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, th...

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those bo...

The social prestige of wine at table and at the club must be destroyed through lofty example and pol...

Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could....

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?