Top 380 H.P. Lovecraft Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Life is not the unique property of Earth. Nor is life in the shape of human beings. Life takes many forms on other planets and far stars, forms that would seem bizarre to humans, as human life is bizarre to other life-forms.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

52. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

53. “Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

54. “The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. That which is not known of does not trouble us, while an imagined but insubstantial peril does not harm us. To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

56. “Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

57. “Maybe, just maybe, I should not have used the word “eldritch” so many times now that I think about it...”

— H.P. Lovecraft

58. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

59. “In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call “happiness”, if we be but able to entertain them.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

60. “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

61. “I could not help feeling that they were evil things – mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

62. “There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls them just within our range.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

64. “Pleasure to me is wonder – the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

65. “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

66. “West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

67. “Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises...”

— H.P. Lovecraft

68. “It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients – or their lack – and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

69. “At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

70. “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

72. “There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

73. “Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heros of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosis among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth!”

— H.P. Lovecraft

74. “Man’s relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man’s relation to the cosmos – to the unknown – which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

75. “I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind – of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

76. “It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplained couplet: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

77. “In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

78. “It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

79. “Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

81. “We love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and we don’t give a damn whether they or we are superior or inferior! They’re confounded pretty, and that’s all we know and all we need to know!”

— H.P. Lovecraft

82. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

83. “Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

84. “It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

85. “The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of 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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

86. “But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

87. “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

88. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

89. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

90. “Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

91. “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

92. “Two widely dissimilar races, whether equal or not, cannot peaceably coexist in the same territory until they are either uniformly mongrelised or cast in folkways of permanent and traditional personal aloofness.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

93. “Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

94. “Free of all responsibility or restraint, in the sheer obliviousness of dreams, he had lived like a happy pagan; and now he must go back to the drear existence of a mediaeval monk, beneath the prompting of an obscure sense of duty.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

95. “My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

96. “Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

97. “I hate the moon – I am afraid of it – for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous. It.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

98. “Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

99. “Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds... – Algernon Blackwood.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

100. “Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.”

— H.P. Lovecraft