Delving into the world of literature, one cannot help but be entranced by the dark and enigmatic prose of H. P. Lovecraft, whose unique style has left an indelible mark on the genre of weird fiction. As we embark on a journey through the depths of his literary legacy, we will be unraveling the intricacies of the mind that gave birth to tales of cosmic horror and existential dread. It is within the pages of his works that we find a treasure trove of unsettling narratives and musings that continue to captivate readers and writers alike. In this exploration, we will be focusing on the profound "Quotes By H. P. Lovecraft" that not only showcase his mastery of language but also offer glimpses into the profound existential themes that permeate his stories.
Quotes By H. P. Lovecraft (2024)
H. P. Lovecraft's literary contributions have left an indelible mark on the world of weird fiction, often captivating readers with his profound and eerie insights. Below, you will find a curated collection of unique quotes from the master of cosmic horror:
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places."
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
"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."
"From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent."
"I could not help feeling that they were evil things—mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss."
"Dreams are the key to the mysteries of the cosmos."
"It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of the 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."
"The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind."
"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."
"To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all."
"We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight."
"I have seen the dark universe yawning, where the black planets roll without aim, where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name."
"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
"Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth."
"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy."
"That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die."
"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."
"The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order and structure of reality."
"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."
"The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but 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 deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
"Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time."
"The true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England."
"The dog is the soul of its master, and its loyalty is stronger than death."
"All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large."
"I am Providence."
"Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents."
"Man's respect for the imponderables varies according to his mental constitution and environment. Through certain modes of thought and training it can be elevated tremendously, yet there is always a limit."
"It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings inside that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry; that festering, unhallowed lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet."
"I am not very proud of my degree of Doctor of Letters; in fact, it is an academic dignity that I hold in slight esteem."
"I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong."
"In time we shall be in a position to bestow upon the human race the master-key to the secret knowledge."
"The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination."
"In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
"The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident."
"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."
"The abyss belongs to the abyss, and it will devour anyone who dares to gaze into it."
"The stars are matter, we're matter, but it doesn't matter."
"I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams."
"I fear for you; I fear for the future."
"The dog is sane; the stars are insane."
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear."
"I have seen the dark universe yawning, Where the black planets roll without aim."
"The stars are right."
"The man who has never been thrilled to the very edges of his soul by a superb horror story is as incomplete as a man who has never read a line of poetry."
"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."
"I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness."
"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!"
"No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace."
"I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me."
"The more I learned, the more an inexplicable sympathy would creep over me; and there was a night when I actually hugged an outlandish manuscript to my breast, mumbling over and over that 'It must be true, it must be true!'"
"There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life."
"Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way."
"The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
"From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent."
"It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of the earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone."
"Dreams are the gateways to the infinite."
"The human mind is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future."
"The scariest thing about the unknown is the infinite possibilities it holds."
"The cosmos is indifferent to the existence of mankind."
"In chaos' lap, 'midst endless time's progression, we are but motes, fleeting sparks of brief existence."
"Man's reliance upon symbols is a distinguishing mark of his species."
"Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all."
"When the stars are right, the Great Old Ones shall return."
"To know is to fear, and to fear is to know."
"All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings."
"Man's reliance upon symbols is a distinguishing mark of his species."
"I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night."
"To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging, and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea."
"The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths."
"The true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous."
"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."
"When we look back beyond the age of chaos, the vision of a thousand, thousand cities will we see, and in the midst of them will be… The Carcosa."
"The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature."
"It was absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of the 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."
"All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."
"The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but 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."
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." (In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.)
"Man's respect for knowledge is one of his most peculiar characteristics."
"The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated."
"To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest."
"The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely."
"I am one who believes that under the right conditions, human beings are capable of anything."
"What had sunk out of sight under the Downs was merely the top of a vast network of tunnels, which honeycombed the ground in this region. The prevalence of these caves and burrows formed a feature of the region we could not help noticing."
"I have seen the dark universe yawning, where the black planets roll without aim; where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge, or lustre, or name."
"Madness rides the star-wind… claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses… dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial…"
"When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death."
"The stars are right, and what an age-old cult had failed to do, a band of innocent sailors had accomplished."
"I have seen the dark universe yawning where the black planets roll without aim."
"Great God! I would rather be a savage brute than a monster, if the monster were not of my own choosing."
"The ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time."
"The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."
"There are horrors beyond horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few."
"The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be."
"To know is to fear, and to fear is to know."
"All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings."
"I have seen the dark universe yawning where the black planets roll without aim."
As we reflect upon the enduring legacy of Quotes By H. P. Lovecraft, we are reminded that his works serve as a testament to the enduring allure of the macabre and the profound impact of storytelling on the human psyche. Lovecraft's exploration of existential dread and the insignificance of humanity in the face of cosmic forces continues to captivate and disturb us in equal measure. His enduring influence on the horror genre is a testament to the enduring power of his words, proving that even in the darkest recesses of our minds, Quotes By H. P. Lovecraft will forever remain a source of fascination and terror, an eternal reminder that in the realm of literature, the unknown will always hold a mystique that beckons us to explore its depths.
