H P Quotes & Sayings

The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. That which is not known of does not trouble us, while an imagined but insubstantial peril does not harm us. To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden. — H.P. Lovecraft

Have only this consolation
that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him. — H.P. Lovecraft

We had allowed ourselves to become distracted on the way to the Crusade, never laid eyes on a Turk, turned to pillage and rapine among the Hungarians and Greeks in order to reach the East ... all for the glory of God, of course, until defeated, — H.P. Lovecraft

It had been so long abandoned that the rats scurrying on their errands spared me no more than occasional glances of annoyance. — H.P. Lovecraft

I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. — H.P. Lovecraft

Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. — H.P. Lovecraft

The sea can bind us to her many moods, whispering to us by the subtle token of a shadow or a gleam upon the waves, and hinting in these ways of her mournfulness or rejoicing. Always she is remembering old things, and these memories, though we may not grasp them, are imparted to us, so that we share her gaiety or remorse. — H.P. Lovecraft

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

Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects. — H.P. Lovecraft

The discoveries of modern science do not disagree with the oldest traditions which claim an incredible antiquity for our race. — H. P. Blavatsky

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

L.P. So your work must fight religion?
J.H. No, not at all! It fights the unconsciousness, the blindness, that all myth creates about itself. You never can see the actual myth you are in or only through a glass darkly. — James Hillman

That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair, if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed. — H.P. Lovecraft

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. — H.P. Lovecraft

The geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, — H.P. Lovecraft

There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. — H.P. Lovecraft

For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming ... — H.P. Lovecraft

Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. — H.P. Lovecraft

I am Providence, and Providence is myself together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro' the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee's ice-clad peak! — H.P. Lovecraft

Not one of us knows what we can do, until one fine day, we stand up and do it. — H.P. Wood

Wells is teaching us to think. Burroughs and his lesser imitators are teaching us not to think. Of course, Burroughs is teaching us to wonder. The sense of wonder is in essence a religious state, blanketing out criticism. Wells was always a critic, even in his most wondrous and romantic tales.

And there, I believe, the two poles of modern fantasy stand defined. At one pole wait Wells and his honorable predecessors such as Swift; at the other, Burroughs and the commercial producers, such as Otis Adelbart Kline, and the weirdies, and horror merchants such as H.P. Lovecraft, and so all the way past Tolkien to today's non-stop fantasy worlders. Mary Shelley stands somewhere at the equator of this metaphor. — Brian W. Aldiss

There is no God but Allah Muhammad (p.b.u.h) is the Messenger of Allah — Irfan

But as soon as you saw his hot, naked bod, you must have been like Bond, what bond? Oh, you mean bondage? — H.P. Mallory

I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. — H.P. Lovecraft

She started to turn around, but I tugged her hand just enough for me to see her profile as she closed her eyes. She felt it as just like I did. There was an undeniable connection between us. I pulled her into my arms and with one hand moved the stray strands of her caramel hair away from her soft skin. I saw her mouth was slightly agape, and I pulled her face towards mine. I was mere centimeters from her lips, the warmth of her breath sliding against my own.
"You should go Mylie or you might regret staying," I said softly.
"I don't want to go," she said anxiously.
Damn. — H.P. Landry

We should perceive that man's period of historical existence, a period so short that his physical constitution has not been altered in the slightest degree, is insufficient to allow of any considerable mental change. — H.P. Lovecraft

All which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead, — H.P. Lovecraft

Whitman Press will publish three children's textbooks, based on your creed, for which you'll deliver manuscripts and artwork. The three books are: 1. Dagon and Jill 2. The Shadow Over Humpty Dumpty 3. A Children's Necronomicon (with pop-up section) — H.P. Lovecraft

Horrors, I believe, should be original - the use of common myths and legends being a weakening influence. — H.P. Lovecraft

That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. — 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

P R E S I D E N T Y O S H I D A'S T E N S P A R T A N R UlE S Hideo Yoshida's quest for management excellence was no doubt driven by his visions for Japanese marketing and media, but also by an overall worry about Japan's economic prospects after World War II. As a result, he developed a set of business and work principles, or rules, which he called the "Ten Spartan Rules": difficult work.5. Once you begin a task, complete it. Never give up.6. Lead and set an example for your fellow workers.7. Set goals for yourself to ensure a constant sense of purpose.8. Move with confidence. It gives your work force and substance.9. At all times, challenge yourself to think creatively and find new solutions.10. When confrontation is necessary, don't shy away from it. Confrontation is often necessary to achieve progress. These traditional work rules still guide Dentsu's employees, and are carried around in their notebooks — Anonymous

His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the 'thirties and 'forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast. — H.P. Lovecraft

When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victims body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods. Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed endlessly and languorously under strange stars. — H.P. Lovecraft

Civilization may progress, human nature will remain the same throughout all ages. — H. P. Blavatsky

I have been reading a delightful, though perhaps rather bitchy new book by Fr. Stephenson about Walsingham and Fr. H.P. There is a vignette of H.P. instructing the Sunday school children on what to do when confronted with an unbaptized person dying in a railway carriage. — Hazel Holt

Words of wisdom, the meaning of life, p e r h a p s even the
answer sought by Borges's librarians - all of these may wash over us every day, but they can do little
for us unless we savor them, engage with them, question them, improve them, and connect them to our
lives — Jonathan Haidt

It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is too tremendous for any to picture of encompass. Of the people of Earth's unfortunate ages, billions of years before, only a few prophets and madman could have conceived that which was to come - could have grasped visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have doubted ... doubted alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow of doom upon the race. For man has always thought himself the immortal master of natural things ... — H.P. Lovecraft

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. — H.P. Lovecraft

And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks white lotos-blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces. — H.P. Lovecraft

I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel. — H.P. Lovecraft

We shall dive down through black abysses ... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever. — H.P. Lovecraft

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism - religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality. — 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

Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings. — H.P. Lovecraft

having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased's home — H.P. Lovecraft

There is no [ ... ] higher than the truth. — H. P. Blavatsky

Prepare, and be forewarned in time. If thou hast tried and failed, O dauntless fighter, yet lose not courage: fight on, and to the charge return again and yet again ...
Remember, thou that fightest for man's liberation, each failure is success, and each sincere attempt wins its rewards in time. — H. P. Blavatsky

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

Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration. — H.P. Lovecraft

I am not very proud of being an human being; in fact, I distinctly dislike the species in many ways. I can readily conceive of beings vastly superior in every respect. — H.P. Lovecraft

To comprehend the Hitler of 1919 is to comprehend the Hitler of the entire period from 1919 through 1945."
--Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 35 — Russel H.S. Stolfi

For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural horror provides an interesting field. — H.P. Lovecraft

Never allow any unnecessary or vain thought to occupy your mind. This is more easily said than done. You cannot make your mind a blank all at once. So in the beginning try to prevent evil or idle thoughts by occupying your mind with the analysis of your own faults, or the contemplation of the Perfect Ones. — H. P. Blavatsky

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

I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind - of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium. — H.P. Lovecraft

He was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become and empty sound. — 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

I speak "with absolute certainty" only so far as my own personal belief is concerned. Those who have not the same warrant for their belief as I have, would be very credulous and foolish to accept it on blind faith. Nor does the writer believe any more than her correspondent and his friends in any "authority" let alone "divine revelation"! — H. P. Blavatsky

Free of all responsibility or restraint, in the sheer obliviousness of dreams, he had lived like a happy pagan; and now he must go back to the drear existence of a mediaeval monk, beneath the prompting of an obscure sense of duty. — H.P. Lovecraft

Theosophy, on earth, is like the white ray of the spectrum, and each religion only one of the seven colours. — H. P. Blavatsky

knowing that to this sunken place all the dead had come, I trembled and did not wish again to speak with the lotos-faces. Yet — H.P. Lovecraft

I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. — H.P. Lovecraft

Relationship. R-E-L-A-T-I-O-N-S-H-I-P means this: Really exciting love affair turns into overwhelming nightmare. Sobriety hangs in peril. — Gary Busey

Every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they? — H. P. Blavatsky

Despite the fact that he's been dead for over seventy years and his prose considered purple and overwrought by many, H.P. Lovecraft's work is still widely read and has remained influential for generations. — Ellen Datlow

There are, I think, four distinct types of weird story: one expressing a mood or feeling, another expressing a pictorial conception, a third expressing a general situation, condition, legend or intellectual conception, and a fourth explaining a definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax. — 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

No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity.
- Through the Gates of the Silver Key — H.P. Lovecraft

I have pledged my word to help people on to truth while living and - will keep my word. Let them abuse and revile me. Let some call me a medium, and a Spiritualist, and others an imposter. The day will come when posterity will learn to know me better. — H. P. Blavatsky

Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. — H.P. Lovecraft

From the Berlin tenement reform law of 1897 to H. P. Berlage's plan for Amsterdam South of 1917, designers and theorists in Germany and Holland moved toward the development of a perimeter residential block that would preserve the plastic continuity of the street while opening up the resultant courtyard for use as an enclosed semi-public space. — Kenneth Frampton

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. — H.P. Lovecraft

The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Impostor. — H.P. Lovecraft

The Christian community, therefore, is that community that freely becomes oppressed, because they know that Jesus himself has defined humanity's liberation in the context of what happens to the little ones. Christians join the cause of the oppressed in the fight for justice not because of some philosophical principle of "the Good" or because of a religious feeling of sympathy for people in prison. Sympathy does not change the structures of injustice. The authentic identity of Christians with the poor is found in the claim which the Jesus-encounter lays upon their own life-style, a claim that connects the word "Christian" with the liberation of the poor. Christians fight not for humanity in general but for themselves and out of their love for concrete human beings. — James H. Cone

When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect - designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead. — H.P. Lovecraft

I have looked upon all the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. — H.P. Lovecraft

The numerals of Pythagoras," says Porphyry, who lived about 300 A.D, "were hieroglyphic symbols, by means whereof he explained all ideas concerning the nature of things," and the same method of explaining the secrets of nature is once again being insisted upon in the new revelation of the "Secret Doctrine," by H. P. Blavatsky. — W. Wynn Westcott

14Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise h partook of the same things, that i through death he might j destroy k the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, 15and deliver all those who l through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. 16For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he m helps the offspring of Abraham. 17Therefore he had n to be made like his brothers in every respect, o so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest p in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. 18For because he himself has suffered q when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted. — Anonymous

Tales of ordinary characters would appeal to a larger class , but I have no wish to make such an appeal . The opinions of the masses are of no interest to me , for praise can truly gratify only when it comes from a mind sharing the author's perspective . There are probably seven persons in all , who really like my work and they are enough . I should write even if I were the only patient reader , for my aim is merely self expression . I could not write about ' ordinary people ' because I am not in the least interested in them . Without interest there can be no art . Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy . It is man's relations to the cosmos - to the unknown - which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination . — H.P. Lovecraft

Children, old crones, peasants, and dogs ramble; cats and philosophers stick to their point. — H.P. Lovecraft

Who are we to combat poisons older than history and mankind? — H.P. Lovecraft

I s'pose you know - though I can see you're a Westerner by your talk - what a lot our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod. — H.P. Lovecraft

The cool, lithe, cynical, and unconquered lord of the housetops. — H.P. Lovecraft

Shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch — H.P. Lovecraft

For one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realize. — H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft is a self-admitted early influence on Ligotti's work. However, in a kind of metaphysical horror story of its own, Ligotti early on subsumed Lovecraft and left his dry husk behind, having taken what sustenance he needed for his own devices. (Most other writers are, by contrast, consumed by Lovecraft when they attempt to devour him.) — Jeff VanderMeer

It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur" although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce - Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story! — H.P. Lovecraft

I read H.P. Lovecraft. I also like Sword and Sorcery stuff, Arthurian legend. — Bruce Boxleitner

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

so that I came to regard it as at least a bearable place to hibernate till one might really live again. — H.P. Lovecraft

I hate the moon - I am afraid of it - for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous. It — H.P. Lovecraft

In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,
But all the sadder tums, the more he knows! — H.P. Lovecraft

As we drew nearer the green shore the bearded man told me of that land, the Land of Zar, where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten. And when I looked upon the terraces again I saw that what he said was true, for among the sights before me were many things I had once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and in the phosphorescent depths of the ocean. — H.P. Lovecraft

It isn't so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but it's centuries away as the soul goes. — H.P. Lovecraft

For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance - or identity - were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley. — H.P. Lovecraft

Bill looked up, wiping his eyes. They were all soaked to the skin and looked like a litter of pups that had just forded a river. "Ih-It's scuh-scuh-hared of u-u-us, you know, " he said. "I can fuh-feel th-that. I swear to Guh-God I c-c-can. " Bev nodded soberly. "I think you're right. " "H-H-Help m-m-me, " Bill said. "P-P-Pl-Please. H-H-Help m-m-me. — Stephen King

I wrote about real people and real circumstances and real neighborhoods. There was no crypt or castles or H.P. Lovecraft-type environments. They were just about normal people who had something bizarre happening to them in the neighborhood. — Richard Matheson

I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within. — H.P. Lovecraft