Top 380 H.P. Lovecraft Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 8

101. “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

102. “The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

103. “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

104. “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 consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity...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

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

106. “When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

107. “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

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

109. “They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

110. “Religion itself is an absurdity and an anomaly, and paganism is acceptable only because it represents that purely orgiastic phase of religion farthest from reality.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

112. “I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

113. “Then came upon an incredible essay by Lafcadio Hearn, something entitled “Gaki,” detailing the curious Japanese belief that insects are really demons or the ghosts of evil men.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

114. “It was just a colour out of space – a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

115. “Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

116. “If we were sensible we would seek death – the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

117. “The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

118. “I could not help feeling that they were evil things – mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

119. “I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

120. “Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

121. “Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

122. “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

123. “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

124. “Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals – for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

125. “In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

126. “There were nameless horrors abroad; and no matter how little one might be able to get at them, one ought tp stand prepared for any sort of action at any time.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

127. “Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

128. “It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

129. “Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one – perhaps the least – of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet’s long and largely unknown career.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

130. “I don’t believe that there is any fourth dimension, and I emphatically do not believe in Tao.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

131. “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

132. “I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism – religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

133. “Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

134. “Religion as a vital issue is dead except on paper, and whatever beauty-baiting the future may witness will be the work of greed and trade, and not of honest cosmos-facing.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

135. “I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

136. “Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of “white trash” in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

137. “Zoologists seem to consider the cerebration of cats and dogs about 50-50 – but my respect always goes to the cool, sure, impersonal, delicately poised feline who minds his business and never slobbers.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

138. “He was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shown the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little Earth gods, with their petty, human interests and connetions – their hatreds, rages, loves, and vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for faith contrary to reason and Nature.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

139. “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

140. “I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

141. “I. Introduction.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

142. “So far as English versification is concerned, Pope was the world, and all the world was Pope.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

143. “As the savage progresses, he acquires experience and formulates codes of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ from his memories of those courses which have helped or hurt him... Then out of the principle of barter comes the illusion of ‘justice’...”

— H.P. Lovecraft

144. “Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but is not life made of beauty and song? And if ye suffer no singers among you, where shall be the fruits of your toil? Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end. Were not death more pleasing?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

145. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

146. “An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

147. “Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

148. “If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must break through all reticences at last – even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

149. “No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings – that one no longer has a self – that is the nameless summit of agony and dread.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

150. “I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic – with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap – and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable;.”

— H.P. Lovecraft