Top 380 H.P. Lovecraft Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

102. “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

103. “The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound – and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

105. “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

106. “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

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

110. “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

111. “Religion is still useful among the herd – that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else...”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

124. “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

125. “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 infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. 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 light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “I am Providence.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

132. “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

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

134. “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

135. “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

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

137. “I. Introduction.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

147. “The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

148. “He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone – whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong – and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

149. “Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

150. “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