"Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown"
— H.P. Lovecraft

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die."
— H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu: And Other Weird Stories)

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

"There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But 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 and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"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."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"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.."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"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. "
— H.P. Lovecraft

"From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming"
— H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories)

"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life."
— H.P. Lovecraft

""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.""
— H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu)

"Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.
Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else..."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way."
— H.P. Lovecraft (The Rats in the Walls)

"The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and 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."
— H.P. Lovecraft

""Never Explain Anything""
— H.P. Lovecraft

"Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!"
— H.P. Lovecraft

"I could not help feeling that they were evil things -- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.
"
— H.P. Lovecraft (At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror)

"Many would have disliked to live, if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and a scholar and had not minded."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.
(Dreams In The Witch-House)"
— H.P. Lovecraft (The Dreams in the Witch House: And Other Weird Stories)

"It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"...I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world."
— H.P. Lovecraft (At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror)

"Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes."
— H.P. Lovecraft (The Rats in the Walls)

"At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything."
— H.P. Lovecraft (The Colour Out of Space)

"... an isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley's best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Dore. He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high Intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape."
— H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories)

"A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold, vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy perfumes from beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable depths. Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window; and for days not counted in men's calandars the tides of far spheres that bore him gently to join the course of other cycles that tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore, a green shore fragrant with lotus blossums and starred by red camalates..."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life."
— H.P. Lovecraft (Supernatural Horror in Literature)

"He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that 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. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness"
— H.P. Lovecraft (At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition)

"Pleasure to me is wonder – the unexplored, the unexpected,
the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks
behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the
immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the
present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs
of delight and beauty"
— H.P. Lovecraft

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"". . .poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last -- what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn -- whatever they had been, they were men!""
— H.P. Lovecraft

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. 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. 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."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquility!" "
— H.P. Lovecraft

"Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream."
— H.P. Lovecraft (H.P. Lovecraft: The Fiction)

"“What do we know,” he had said, “of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there - a worn flight of steps, a wormy pair of decorative columns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"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."
— H.P. Lovecraft