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.
H. P. LOVECRAFTFear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions.
More H. P. Lovecraft Quotes
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Truth is of no practical value to mankind save as it affects terrestrial phenomena, hence the discoveries of science should be concealed or glossed over wherever they conflict with orthodoxy.
H. P. LOVECRAFT -
It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared – as it always should be.
H. P. LOVECRAFT -
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT -
Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and shambles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement.
H. P. LOVECRAFT -
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT -
The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning, since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader.
H. P. LOVECRAFT -
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT -
A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone, and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep.
H. P. LOVECRAFT -
I could not write about ‘ordinary people’ because I am not in the least interested in them.
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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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT -
The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.
H. P. LOVECRAFT -
All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large.
H. P. LOVECRAFT -
Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.
H. P. LOVECRAFT -
The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.
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I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
H. P. LOVECRAFT