Top 301 Quotes & Sayings by H. P. Lovecraft

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer H. P. Lovecraft.

Last updated on November 22, 2024.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos.

American - Writer | August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937

Source: Wikipedia

I am essentially a recluse who will have very little to do with people wherever he may be. I think that most people only make me nervous - that only by accident, and in extremely small quantities, would I ever be likely to come across people who wouldn't.

H. P. Lovecraft

The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.

H. P. Lovecraft

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

H. P. Lovecraft

I do not think that any realism is beautiful.

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

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

H. P. Lovecraft

Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.

H. P. Lovecraft

Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality - the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men.

H. P. Lovecraft

Of our relation to all creation we can never know anything whatsoever. All is immensity and chaos. But, since all this knowledge of our limitations cannot possibly be of any value to us, it is better to ignore it in our daily conduct of life.

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

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

Denied anything ardently desired, the individual or state will argue and parley just so long - then, if the impelling motive be sufficiently great, will cast aside every rule and break down every acquired inhibition, plunging viciously after the object wished; all the more fantastically savage because of previous repression.

H. P. Lovecraft

Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.

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

All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum total of human happiness.

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

Never should an unfamiliar word be passed over without elucidation, for, with a little conscientious research, we may each day add to our conquests in the realm of philology and become more and more ready for graceful independent expression.

H. P. Lovecraft

It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolised master of a dog whose instinct it is to idolise, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a philosophic cat who is wholly his own master and could easily choose another companion if he found such an one more agreeable and interesting.

H. P. Lovecraft

A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone, and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep.

H. P. Lovecraft

Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.

H. P. Lovecraft

Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or 'outsideness' without laying stress on the emotion of fear.

H. P. Lovecraft

Very few minds are strictly normal, and all religious fanatics are marked with abnormalities of various sorts.

H. P. Lovecraft

Personally, I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.

H. P. Lovecraft

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

H. P. Lovecraft

It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.

H. P. Lovecraft

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

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

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.

H. P. Lovecraft

We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles.

H. P. Lovecraft

One can never produce anything as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about.

H. P. Lovecraft

From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.

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

Adulthood is hell.

H. P. Lovecraft

In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence, I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.

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 listen 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.

H. P. Lovecraft

The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such.

H. P. Lovecraft

The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning, since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader.

H. P. Lovecraft

To me, there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form - and local human passions and conditions and standards - are depicted as native to other worlds and universes.

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

H. P. Lovecraft

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

H. P. Lovecraft

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

H. P. Lovecraft

Plots may be simple or complex, but suspense, and climactic progress from one incident to another, are essential. Every incident in a fictional work should have some bearing on the climax or denouement, and any denouement which is not the inevitable result of the preceding incidents is awkward and unliterary.

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

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

H. P. Lovecraft

One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions. Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential.

H. P. Lovecraft

All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large.

H. P. Lovecraft

There are, I think, four distinct types of weird story: one expressing a mood or feeling, another expressing a pictorial conception, a third expressing a general situation, condition, legend or intellectual conception, and a fourth explaining a definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax.

H. P. Lovecraft

Fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions.

H. P. Lovecraft

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

H. P. Lovecraft

Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience.

H. P. Lovecraft

For correct writing, the cultivation of patience and mental accuracy is essential. Throughout the young author's period of apprenticeship, he must keep reliable dictionaries and textbooks at his elbow; eschewing as far as possible that hasty extemporaneous manner of writing which is the privilege of more advanced students.

H. P. Lovecraft

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.

H. P. Lovecraft

One superlatively important effect of wide reading is the enlargement of vocabulary which always accompanies it.

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

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

I am not very proud of being an human being; in fact, I distinctly dislike the species in many ways. I can readily conceive of beings vastly superior in every respect.

H. P. Lovecraft

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

H. P. Lovecraft

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

H. P. Lovecraft