H.P. Lovecraft Quotes
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.
Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.
The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.
If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.
I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.
I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.
The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
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.
What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!
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.
Man is an essentially superstitious and fearful animal. Take away the herd's Christian gods and saints and they will without failing come to worship...something else.
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
Someday our piecing together of knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas we shall either go mad or flee into the safety of a new dark age.
I could not write about "ordinary people" because I am not in the least interested in them.
Nothing matters, but it's perhaps more comfortable to keep calm and not interfere with other people.
Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.
Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.
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.
It is good to be a cynic - it is better to be a contented cat - and it is best not to exist at all.
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!
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.
The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.
The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.