H.P. Lovecraft Quotes
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.
Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber, Past the wan-mooned abysses of night, I have lived o'er my lives without number, I have sounded all things with my sight.
Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
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.
If we were sensible we would seek death - the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.
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.
Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth.
Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other.
I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.
I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!
The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods.
In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call "happiness", if we be but able to entertain them.
Maybe, just maybe, I should not have used the word "eldritch" so many times now that I think about it.
Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.
Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone-I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise.
No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.
And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.
I am Providence, and Providence is myself - together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro' the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee's ice-clad peak!
Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.
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.
To me there is nothing more fraught with mystery & terror than a remote Massachusetts farmhouse against a lonely hill. Where else could an outbreak like the Salem witchcraft have occurred?
It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.
So far as English versification is concerned, Pope was the world, and all the world was Pope.
With hidden powers of unknown extent apparently at his disposal, Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town.
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.
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.
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.
The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre.
Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.
All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum total of human happiness.
Fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions.
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience.
That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
Shall I compare thee to a Shoggoth?
But of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets.
In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes, But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!
For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming...
We are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.
Heaven knows where I'll end up - it's a safe bet I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.
I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel.
It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.
I have seen the dark universe yawningWhere the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.
For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance - or identity - were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.
By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins.
