H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

Our brains deliberately make us forget things, to prevent insanity

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

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.

No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.

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

That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.

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.

Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating.

If we were sensible we would seek death - the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.

I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.

The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods.

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

The greatest human achievements have never been for profit.

I like coffee exceedingly.

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left 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.

As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, [and] steel their emotions against decent human sympathy.

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.

The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.

Never Explain Anything

Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.

I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.

It is good to be a cynic - it is better to be a contented cat - and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world - we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death - the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.

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