There are quite a few authors I turn to in my time of need. Surely that’s not a shock. Still, it might be surprising to hear that H. P. Lovecraft is one of them. What’s more, I actually have a full list of H. P. Lovecraft quotes that remind me of the brilliance, apathy, and the unexpected love of cats this amazing writer harbored in his mind.
I admire Lovecraft for many of his accomplishments. However, I cherish him as one of my inspirations because he took what life cruelly handed to him and turned it into something magnificent.
As a person, Lovecraft wasn’t without flaws. Still, he was a scintillating writer and a pioneer in his field. Nowadays, his surname, which was his real family name, brands the entire genre of works that came after him (and thanks to him).
Lovecraft did have several pen names throughout his writing career. However, his most famous works and his greatest accomplishments are all attributed to the name of H. P. Lovecraft.
So, if you’re a Lovecraft fan like me, I’m sure you’ll enjoy my list of chilling and inspiring H. P. Lovecraft quotes.
H. P. Lovecraft Quotes That Show Why He’s the King of Literary Horror
H. P. Lovecraft Quotes About Fear and Horror
#1. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
#2. “Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.”
#3. “From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.”
#4. “Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.”
#5. “No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.”
#6. “It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.”
#7. “The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.”
#8. “Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.”
#9. “Fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions.”
#10. “Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or ‘outsideness’ without laying stress on the emotion of fear.”
#11. “There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls them just within our range.”
H. P. Lovecraft Quotes About Insanity and the Unknown
#12. “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.”
#13. “Almost nobody dances sober unless they happen to be insane.”
#14. “If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!”
#15. “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.”
#16. “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; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”
#17. “Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.”
H. P. Lovecraft Quotes About Mankind and Life
#18. “The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
#19. “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!”
#20. “I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.”
#21. “I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.”
#22. “I am not very proud of being a human being; in fact, I distinctly dislike the species in many ways. I can readily conceive of beings vastly superior in every respect.”
#23. “Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.”
#24. “Adulthood is hell.”
#25. “It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day’s end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may.”
#26. “Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.”
H. P. Lovecraft Quotes About His Beloved Cats
#27. “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, civilized, master-class men.”
#28. “It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.”
#29. “The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilized cynic to do other than worship it.”
#30. “It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolized master of a dog whose instinct it is to idolize, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a philosophic cat who is wholly his own master and could easily choose another companion if he found such a one more agreeable and interesting.”
#31. “The cat is classic whilst the dog is Gothic – nowhere in the animal world can we discover such really Hellenic perfection of form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the Felidae.”
#32. “The only saving grace of the present is that it’s too damned stupid to question the past very closely.”
To Conclude
A product of cruel parenting, bitter childhood, and merciless circumstance, Lovecraft managed to do what few before him did. He explored fiction and brought to life something that was avant-garde, eccentric, and disturbing (just like him).
These H. P. Lovecraft quotes depict just a fraction of the man’s brilliance. Still, even a tiny glimpse is sometimes enough, and I hope you bask in it as much as I do.
Image source: H. P. Lovecraft phote from nytimes.com
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