H. P. Lovecraft quotes

H. P. Lovecraft was an American writer, best known for his influential works of horror and weird fiction. His stories explore cosmic horror, forbidden knowledge, and the limits of human understanding. He remains a major inspiration for generations of writers, filmmakers, and artists. Here are 208 of his quotes:

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

H. P. Lovecraft

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

H. P. Lovecraft

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

H. P. Lovecraft

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

H. P. Lovecraft

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

H. P. Lovecraft

There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.

H. P. Lovecraft

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

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

H. P. Lovecraft

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.

H. P. Lovecraft

I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.

H. P. Lovecraft

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

H. P. Lovecraft

I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.

H. P. Lovecraft

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.

H. P. Lovecraft

Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.

H. P. Lovecraft

Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.

H. P. Lovecraft

I am Providence, and Providence is myself-together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro' the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee's ice-clad peak!

H. P. Lovecraft

The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.

H. P. Lovecraft

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

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

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

H. P. Lovecraft

Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.

H. P. Lovecraft

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.

H. P. Lovecraft