Top 140 Robert E. Howard Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I have known many gods. He who denies them is blind as he who trusts them too deeply.”

— Robert E. Howard

52. “Someday, when all your civilization and science are likewise swept away, your kind will pray for a man with a sword.”

— Robert E. Howard

53. “I have no fear of the Hereafter. An orthodox hell could hardly be more torture than my life has been.”

— Robert E. Howard

54. “What shall a man say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren words, only words.”

— Robert E. Howard

55. “Life is but a web spun of ghosts and dreams and illusions.”

— Robert E. Howard

56. “One man’s bane is another’s bliss.”

— Robert E. Howard

57. “Gleaming shell of an outworn lie; fable of Right divine – You gained your crowns by heritage, but Blood was the price of mine. The throne that I won by blood and sweat, by Crom, I will not sell For promise of valleys filled with gold, or threat of the Halls of Hell!”

— Robert E. Howard

58. “I see in the papers where Roy Guthrie committed suicide. Why, I wonder?”

— Robert E. Howard

59. “Men are but men, and the greatest men are they who soonest learn the simpler things.”

— Robert E. Howard

60. “Any but the most brutish of men must be touched with a certain awe or wonder at the baring of a woman’s naked soul.”

— Robert E. Howard

61. “A pantherish twist and shift of his body avoided the blundering rush of two yellow swordsmen, and the blade of one missing its objective, was sheathed in the breast of the other. A.”

— Robert E. Howard

62. “When the oceans drown the world, women will take time for jealousy.”

— Robert E. Howard

63. “A kingdom is not lost by a single defeat.”

— Robert E. Howard

64. “It was no ape, neither was it a man. It was some shambling horror spawned in the mysterious, nameless jungles of the south, where strange life teemed in the reeking rot without the dominance of man, and drums thundered in temples that had never known the tread of a human foot.”

— Robert E. Howard

65. “What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?”

— Robert E. Howard

66. “My body seems a mere encumbrance to me; an imbecillic wagon, hitched to the horse of desire, which is the soul.”

— Robert E. Howard

67. “It is an ill thing to meet a man you thought dead in the woodland at dusk.”

— Robert E. Howard

68. “Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs before dawn.”

— Robert E. Howard

69. “Civilization is a natural and inevitable consequence – whether good or evil I am not prepared to state.”

— Robert E. Howard

70. “The moon rose, striking fire from the Cimmerian’s horned helmet. No call awoke the echoes; yet suddenly the night grew tense and the jungle held its breath. Instinctively Conan loosened the great sword in its sheath.”

— Robert E. Howard

71. “Coming, as I do, from mountain folk on one side and sea followers on the other, there are few old songs of the hills or the sea with which I am not familiar.”

— Robert E. Howard

72. “It was made from the black lotus, whose blossoms wave in the lost jungles of Khitai, where only the yellow-skulled priests of Yun dwell. Those blossoms strike dead any who smell of them.”

— Robert E. Howard

73. “He was like a tiger among baboons as he leaped, side-stepped and spun, offering an ever-moving target, while his ax wove a shining wheel of death about him. For.”

— Robert E. Howard

74. “They take little interest in waking life, choosing to lie most of the time in death-like sleep.” “Then.”

— Robert E. Howard

75. “I became a writer in spite of my environments.”

— Robert E. Howard

76. “If I was wealthy I’d never do anything but poke around in ruined cities all over the world – and probably get snake-bit.”

— Robert E. Howard

77. “Men spoke of tribal war, of a gathering of vultures in the southeast, and a terrible leader who led his swiftly increasing hordes to victory.”

— Robert E. Howard

78. “They trapped the Lion on Shamu’s plain; They weighted his limbs with an iron chain; They cried aloud in the trumpet-blast, They cried, “The lion is caged at last!” Woe to the Cities of river and plain If ever the Lion stalks again! – Old Ballad.”

— Robert E. Howard

79. “But folk who have tasted of death are only partly alive. In the dark corners of their souls and minds, death still lurks unconquered.”

— Robert E. Howard

80. “Rome got some peachy pastings when she tried to lick the Irish.”

— Robert E. Howard

81. “I am Solomon Kane.” The voice was resonant and powerful. “Are you prepared to meet your God?” “Why, Monsieur,” Le Loup answered, bowing, “I assure you I am as ready as I ever will be. I might ask Monsieur the same question.” “No doubt I stated my inquiry wrongly,” Kane said grimly. “I will change it: Are you prepared to meet your master, the Devil?”

— Robert E. Howard

82. “How did you come to your crown, you and that black-faced pig beside you? Your fathers did the fighting and the suffering, and handed their crowns to you on golden platters. What you inherited without lifting a finger – except to poison a few brothers – I fought for. “You.”

— Robert E. Howard

83. “Civilization is a network and a maze of precedences and custom.”

— Robert E. Howard

84. “They realize their ultimate doom, but they are fatalists, incapable of resistance or escape. Not one of the present generation has been out of sight of these walls.”

— Robert E. Howard

85. “Every twinge of sensation, even of agony, was a negation of death.”

— Robert E. Howard

86. “But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember – that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.”

— Robert E. Howard

87. “We’re making tin gods out of those poor buffoons in Hollywood; I dote on movies and appreciate the scanty art therein but I consider the profession about the most debased and debasing I know.”

— Robert E. Howard

88. “I reckon if I ever marry, she will have to be a strong woman in a circus or something.”

— Robert E. Howard

89. “But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality.”

— Robert E. Howard

90. “You black dog!” A red mist of fury swept across Conan’s eyes. “Were I free I’d give you a broken back!”

— Robert E. Howard

91. “It is not pleasant to come upon Death in a lonely place at midnight.”

— Robert E. Howard

92. “I have put off the past like a worn-out cloak.”

— Robert E. Howard

93. “The poem you sent me was as fiery and virile as anything you’ve ever written – or anybody else, for that matter. Especially the second part went to my brain like the flaming liquor of insanity. No one else besides Jack London has the power to move me just that way.”

— Robert E. Howard

94. “Conan mentally termed the creatures black men, for lack of a better term; instinctively he knew that these tall ebony beings were not men, as he understood the term. No.”

— Robert E. Howard

95. “Damned be the dark ends of the earth where old horrors live again.”

— Robert E. Howard

96. “He saw no particular humor in it, and was too new to civilization to understand its discourtesies. Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing. He was bewildered and chagrined, and doubtless would have slunk away, abashed, but the Kothian chose.”

— Robert E. Howard

97. “The people among which I lived – and yet live, mainly – made their living from cotton, wheat, cattle, oil, with the usual percentage of business men and professional men.”

— Robert E. Howard

98. “I have come to believe that mankind eternally hovers on the brinks of secret oceans of which it knows nothing.”

— Robert E. Howard

99. “A woman in such an emotional tempest is as perilous as a blind cobra to any about her.”

— Robert E. Howard

100. “Again the governor knelt, for part of his wisdom was the knowledge that a woman in such an emotional tempest is as perilous as a blind cobra to any about her.”

— Robert E. Howard