H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

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H. P. Lovecraft

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 20, 1890

Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience.

H. P. Lovecraft

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

H. P. Lovecraft

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

H. P. Lovecraft

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

H. P. Lovecraft

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

I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.

H. P. Lovecraft

Of our relation to all creation we can never know anything whatsoever. All is immensity and chaos. But, since all this knowledge of our limitations cannot possibly be of any value to us, it is better to ignore it in our daily conduct of life.

H. P. Lovecraft

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

From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.

H. P. Lovecraft

Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality - the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men.

H. P. Lovecraft

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

H. P. Lovecraft

The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft

The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.

H. P. Lovecraft

Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.

H. P. Lovecraft

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

H. P. Lovecraft

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

H. P. Lovecraft

Fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions.

H. P. Lovecraft

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

One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions. Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential.

H. P. Lovecraft

The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning, since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader.

H. P. Lovecraft