Robert E. Howard Quotes

144 Sourced Quotes

But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality.

Robert E. Howard
Civilization is a network and a maze of precedences and custom.

Robert E. Howard
Animals are neither gods nor fiends, but men in their way without the lust and greed of man.

Robert E. Howard
Men are but men, and the greatest men are they who soonest learn the simpler things.

Robert E. Howard
Any but the most brutish of men must be touched with a certain awe or wonder at the baring of a woman's naked soul.

Robert E. Howard
What is death but a traversing of eternities and a crossing of cosmic oceans?

Robert E. Howard
There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness. Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem and upon the fingers of the women sparkle drearily like the ice of white seas; the speech of men is as the empty rattle of a jester's bell and the feel comes of things unreal; even the sun is copper in the sky and the breath of the green ocean is no longer fresh.

Robert E. Howard
It is an ill thing to meet a man you thought dead in the woodland at dusk.

Robert E. Howard
I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Robert E. Howard
Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.

Robert E. Howard
I have known many gods. He who denies them is blind as he who trusts them too deeply.

Robert E. Howard
For man's only weapon is courage that flinches not from the gates of Hell itself, and against such not even the legions of Hell can stand.

Robert E. Howard
Man can be that which he wishes to be; form and substance, they are but shadows. The mind, the ego, the essence of the god-dream -- that is real, that is immortal.

Robert E. Howard
Before the invader sound was born, the Universe was silent and shall be again.

Robert E. Howard
It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments.

Robert E. Howard
Man is better without knowledge of things to come, for what is to be will be, and man can neither avert nor hasten. It is better to go in the dark when the road must pass a lion and there is no other road.

Robert E. Howard
I have gone into yesterday and tomorrow and both were as real as today -- which is like the dreams of ghosts!

Robert E. Howard
Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.

Robert E. Howard
But not all men seek rest and peace; some are born with the spirit of the storm in their blood.

Robert E. Howard
While we may open the books of the past, we may but grant flying glances of the future, through the mist that veils it.

Robert E. Howard
Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally - oh, very rarely! - the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.

Robert E. Howard
Man is still an ape in that he forgets what is not ever before his eyes.

Robert E. Howard
A woman in such an emotional tempest is as perilous as a blind cobra to any about her.

Robert E. Howard
Over the souls of men spread the condor wings of colossal monsters and all manner of evil things prey upon the heart and soul and body of Man. Yet it may be in some far day the shadows shall fade and the Prince of Darkness be chained forever in his hell. And till then mankind can but stand up stoutly to the monsters in his own heart and without, and with the aid of God he may yet triumph.

Robert E. Howard