H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

211 Sourced Quotes

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
So far as English versification is concerned, Pope was the world, and all the world was Pope.

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
Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal

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
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
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
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
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
They told him that every figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one or more dimension — as a square is cut from a cube, or a circle from a sphere.

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

H. P. Lovecraft
A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.

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

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

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
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
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
Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other.

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
Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience--but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.

H. P. Lovecraft
There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret.

H. P. Lovecraft
The very fact that religions are not content to stand on their own feet, but insist on crippling or warping the flexible minds of children in their favour, forms a sufficient proof that there is no truth in them. If there were any truth in religion, it would be even more acceptable to a mature mind than to an infant mind--yet no mature mind ever accepts religion unless it has been crippled in infancy.

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
Religion as a vital issue is dead except on paper, and whatever beauty-baiting the future may witness will be the work of greed and trade, and not of honest cosmos-facing.

H. P. Lovecraft
Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.

H. P. Lovecraft