Top 380 H.P. Lovecraft Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

Featured in: Fiction Quotes, Fear Quotes

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Fiction Quotes

3. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Ignorance Quotes

4. “Never Explain Anything.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

5. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Lonely Quotes, Feeling Alone Quotes

7. “There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

8. “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Fiction Quotes

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

10. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

11. “I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

12. “I like coffee exceedingly...”

— H.P. Lovecraft

13. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

15. “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...”

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Quotes About the Sea

16. “The greatest human achievements have never been for profit.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Achievement Quotes

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

19. “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

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

21. “I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Quotes About Memories

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

24. “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

25. “That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

26. “I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Quotes About Laughing

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Sadness Quotes, Quotes About Childhood

28. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

30. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

31. “And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

32. “Do not call up that which you cannot put down.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

34. “Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

35. “The cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

36. “In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

37. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

38. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Book Quotes

39. “Life is a hideous thing.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

41. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

42. “Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Creative Quotes

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

45. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

46. “As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

48. “Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

50. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft