"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."


Here's another one, though not as riveting and brilliant as the one above, I still like it and thought it worth posting:

"Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds... "

More H. P. Lovecraft Quotes:

All of my 38 1/2 years show in me, I guess; and so far as my temperament is concerned, I was born an old man.

And now, at thirty-seven, I am gradually headed for pure antiquarianism and architecture, and away from literature altogether!

As for affectation - I'm not fond of any kind, but hate literary affectation the worst, because it is more permanent and subversive in its essence.

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.

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

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.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.

Despite my tremendous admiration for things like Dunsany's Gods of the Mountain and O'Neill's Emperor Jones, I have never as yet employed drama as a medium of expression. Probably the reason is that in the sort of work I am trying to do human characters matter very little.

Heaven knows where I'll end up - but it's a safe bet that I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.

However - I am not quite such a solemn prig as you probably assume from my letters.

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.

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.

I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.

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

If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.

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.

In a way, crosswords do harm by cluttering up the mind with an aimless heap of unusual words selected purely for mechanical exigencies and having no well-proportioned relation to the needs of graceful discourse.

In the land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor death.

It is a treadmill, squirrel-trap culture - drugged and frenzied with the hasheesh of industrial servitude and material luxury. It is wholly a material body-culture, and its symbol is the tiled bathroom and steam radiator rather than the Doric portico and the temple of philosophy.

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.

Mere grotesqueness is very common; sly, malign madness sometimes lurks around the corner; and berserk, revolting murder under peculiarly messy and clumsy conditions is a matter of not infrequent record.

My fiction can't be compared with Poe's or Machen's, but I take no less pleasure in writing it on that account.

Now 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.

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

Of course, so far as personal taste goes, I'm no lover of humanity. To me cats are in every way more graceful and worthy of respect - but I don't try to raise my personal bias to the spurious dignity of a dogmatic generality.

Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heros of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosis among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth!

Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Those who have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations, do not watch him again.

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.

Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.

We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.

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!