H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

211 Sourced Quotes

I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either. I would as soon do the one as the other sort of thing--it is all a matter of harmony and good taste.

H. P. Lovecraft
Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals -- for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.

H. P. Lovecraft
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

H. P. Lovecraft
It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.

H. P. Lovecraft
Two widely dissimilar races, whether equal or not, cannot peaceably coexist in the same territory until they are either uniformly mongrelised or cast in folkways of permanent and traditional personal aloofness.

H. P. Lovecraft
Most of my monsters fail altogether to satisfy my sense of the cosmic--the abnormally chromatic entity in "The Colour Out of Space" being the only one of the lot which I take any pride in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

H. P. Lovecraft
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
In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!

H. P. Lovecraft
Nothing matters, but it's perhaps more comfortable to keep calm and not interfere with other people.

H. P. Lovecraft
Religion itself is an absurdity and an anomaly, and paganism is acceptable only because it represents that purely orgiastic phase of religion farthest from reality.

H. P. Lovecraft
In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively considered, and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown.

H. P. Lovecraft