H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

211 Sourced Quotes

We were not... in any sense childishly superstitious, but scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy.

H. P. Lovecraft
I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time.

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
Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.

H. P. Lovecraft
And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.

H. P. Lovecraft
Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration.

H. P. Lovecraft
The cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see.

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
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
It is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now--but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived.

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 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
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
In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring.

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
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
Zoologists seem to consider the cerebration of cats and dogs about 50-50 -- but my respect always goes to the cool, sure, impersonal, delicately poised feline who minds his business and never slobbers.

H. P. Lovecraft
It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.

H. P. Lovecraft
The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre.

H. P. Lovecraft
All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

H. P. Lovecraft
The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect successions of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines.

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
Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme.

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
All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me...

H. P. Lovecraft
Nyarlathotep... the crawling chaos... I am the last... I will tell the audient void....

H. P. Lovecraft
It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients--or their lack--and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws.

H. P. Lovecraft
I could not write about "ordinary people" because I am not in the least interested in them.

H. P. Lovecraft
Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heros of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosis among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth!

H. P. Lovecraft
My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.

H. P. Lovecraft