H. P. Lovecraft Quotes - Page 3

All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me.

Some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze andstone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horsesalong the edges of thick forests, and then we know that we have looked backthrough the ivory gates into that world of wonder that was ours, before we were wise and unhappy.

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!

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

incurable lover of the grotesque

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

Someday our piecing together of knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas we shall either go mad or flee into the safety of a new dark age.

It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would set aside all the intellectual progress of years, and plunge us back into the darkness of mediaeval disbelief.

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

I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups - (a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities.

The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'. Only egotism exists.

Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.

I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time.

Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises.

Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.

Nothing matters, but it's perhaps more comfortable to keep calm and not interfere with other people.

Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.

I am perfectly confident that I could never adequately convey to any other human being the precise reasons why I continue to refrain from suicide - the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthensome quality.

Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.

Maybe, just maybe, I should not have used the word "eldritch" so many times now that I think about it.

The cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see.

Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me.

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.

Life is not the unique property of Earth. Nor is life in the shape of human beings. Life takes many forms on other planets and far stars, forms that would seem bizarre to humans, as human life is bizarre to other life-forms.