The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft Quotes

“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, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Fiction: Complete and Unabridged

“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 Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

“Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction

“It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Collection

“To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Collection

“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone;”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Collection

“for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.”
― H. P. Lovecraft, The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

“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, The Complete Fiction [contains links to free audiobooks]

“For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. I”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft: Complete Collection of Works with analysis and historical background (Annotated and Illustrated)

“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”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

“He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete H.P. Lovecraft Collection

“They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft: 102 Horror Short Stories, Novels, Juvenelia, Collaborations and Ghost Writings

“My eldest cat, “Nigger-Man,” was seven years old and had come with me from my home in Bolton, Massachusetts;”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

“Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don't burn it.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Collection with Accompanying Facts

“Without warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

“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.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know; and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft: 102 Horror Short Stories, Novels, Juvenelia, Collaborations and Ghost Writings

“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”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction

“The strange things of the past which I learnt during those nocturnal meetings with the dead he dismisses as the fruits of my lifelong and omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient volumes of the family library. Had it not been for my old servant Hiram, I should have by this time become quite convinced of my madness. But”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Fiction

“In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Fiction

“March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft