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46 Incredible H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

H. P. Lovecraft was an American author best known for his influential works of horror fiction. With short stories to movies, more than 40 books have been produced in his name. Here is a look at some of the best H. P. Lovecraft quotes to inspire future writers.

“All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.”

“Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.”

“Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.”

“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.”

“For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming…”

“From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”

“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.”

“I am only about half alive a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.”

“I could not write about”ordinary people” because I am not in the least interested in them.”

“I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.”

“I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”

“I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.”

“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.”

“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”

“I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.”

“If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!”

“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.”

“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.”

“It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well.”

“It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion.”

“It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.”

“Life is a hideous thing.”

“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.”

“Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.”

“No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.”

“Nothing matters, but it’s perhaps more comfortable to keep calm and not interfere with other people.”

“Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.”

“Our brains deliberately make us forget things, to prevent insanity”

“Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.”

“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.”

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied.”

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

“The only saving grace of the present is that it’s too damned stupid to question the past very closely.”

“The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.”

“The very fact that religions are not content to stand on their own feet, but insist on crippling or warping the flexible minds of children in their favour, forms a sufficient proof that there is no truth in them.”

“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”

“There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.”

“To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest..”

“To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.”

“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!”

“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.”

“Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.”

Here is a look at the strange life of H. P. Lovecraft and man behind the various works of weird fiction.

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