He is one of the all-time masters of horror and the macabre. His major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror, the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien.
He wrote fantasy and horror in the best tradition of Poe, Blackwood, and Machen. His own style gained many admirers and was later imitated by others. (1890 – 1937)
– H.P. Lovecraft Quotes –
The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
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.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Heaven knows where I’ll end up – but it’s a safe bet that I’ll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
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.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
~ H.P. Lovecraft
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.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
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.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
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!
~ H.P. Lovecraft
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.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
The most merciful thing in the world… is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
~ 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 learn 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. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
