H.P. Lovecraft Quotes (Author of The Call of Cthulhu) (2024)

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“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
H. P. Lovecraft

3258 likes

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“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, Supernatural Horror in Literature

tags: fear-of-unknown

2330 likes

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“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

2201 likes

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“Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.”
Howard Phillips Lovecraft

tags: dance, dancing, life

1768 likes

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“From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”
H.P. Lovecraft, Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

tags: horror, irony

1631 likes

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“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Nameless City

tags: death

960 likes

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“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.”
H. P. Lovercraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

tags: dread

819 likes

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“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.”
H. P. Lovecraft

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“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... 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.”
H.P. Lovecraft

tags: comprehension, dark-age, dissociated, dissociation, human-mind, science

668 likes

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“It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.”
H.P. Lovecraft, Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany

tags: cats, cynic, existence, suicide

640 likes

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“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”
H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

tags: horror, lovecraft

556 likes

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“Never Explain Anything”
H.P. Lovecraft

547 likes

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“Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusem*nt. And just as inferior people prefer the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants something, so do superior people respect the superior animal which lives its own life and knows that the puerile stick-throwings of alien bipeds are none of its business and beneath its notice. The dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. That pleases a meekness-loving peasant who relishes a stimulus to his self importance. The cat, on the other hand, charms you into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in the humour. That is personality and individuality and self-respect -- the calm mastery of a being whose life is its own and not yours -- and the superior person recognises and appreciates this because he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his own heritage and aesthetic sense.”
H.P. Lovecraft

tags: cats, dogs, lovecraft

505 likes

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“To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest..”
H.P. Lovecraft

tags: letters, moving-on

493 likes

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“I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.”
H. P. Lovecraft, Nemesis

tags: dark-universe, horror

488 likes

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“If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!”
H.P. Lovecraft, The Temple

tags: cthulu, madness

414 likes

“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.”
H.P. Lovecraft

tags: dread

410 likes

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“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.”
H.P. Lovecraft

tags: writing

406 likes

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“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

tags: cthulhu, evil, h-p-lovecraft, horror, weird

397 likes

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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

tags: life

385 likes

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“Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.
Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else...”
H.P. Lovecraft

tags: god, mankind, organized-religion, religion

314 likes

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“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.”
H.P. Lovecraft

304 likes

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

294 likes

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“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.”
H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu: With a Dedication by George Henry Weiss

288 likes

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“We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... 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. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.”
H.P. Lovecraft, Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft

tags: absurdity, atheism, atheist, bias, brainwashing, cheat, conformity, emotion, evidence, falsity, honor, indoctrination, orthodox, religionists, truth, value

260 likes

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“Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.”
H. P. Lovecraft

tags: death, life, religion

228 likes

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“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. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.”
Howard Phillips Lovecraft

226 likes

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“Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.”
H.P. Lovecraft, The Rats in the Walls

tags: fear, memory, psychology

207 likes

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“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.”
H.P. Lovecraft

tags: emotion, fear, mankind

200 likes

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“No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.”
H. P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales

tags: horror, life, ordinary

155 likes

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Books by H.P. Lovecraft

At the Mountains of Madness
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The Best of H.P. Lovecraft
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At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror
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The Dunwich Horror and Others
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H.P. Lovecraft Quotes  (Author of The Call of Cthulhu) (2024)

FAQs

What is the famous quote from The Call of Cthulhu? ›

I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. The quote from The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft reflects a profound sense of existential dread and anguish.

What was H.P. Lovecraft's most famous quote? ›

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.

What is the creepiest quote from H.P. Lovecraft? ›

H.P. Lovecraft

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.

What is the most popular Lovecraft quotes? ›

H.P. Lovecraft
  • [1921] It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. ...
  • The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
  • [epitaph in his gravestone]: I am Providence.

What is the Cthulhu phrase? ›

The short story asserts the premise that, while currently trapped, Cthulhu will eventually return. His worshippers chant "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" ("In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming").

What is Cthulhu a metaphor for? ›

His Call. Cthulhu represents more than just a powerful god alien from another galaxy. No, Cthulhu represents the existential dread that we all feel. He represents the insurmountable.

What did H.P. Lovecraft fear? ›

Lovecraft was afraid of nearly everything. Perhaps the most notable fear of Lovecraft's was his unconditional fear of the ocean and anything connected with it. Be it marine life or seafood in general. Lovecraft was able to put his own horrors on paper and create monsters and deities that came from the ocean.

What words did H.P. Lovecraft use? ›

It's Not Squamous. The 10 Words H.P. Lovecraft Used Most Often
  • Hideous – 260.
  • Faint (ed/ing) – 189.
  • Nameless – 157.
  • Antiqu (e/arian) – 128.
  • Singular (ly) – 115.
  • Madness – 115.
  • Abnormal – 94.
  • Blasphem (y/ous) – 92.
Feb 16, 2015

What language did H.P. Lovecraft speak? ›

English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England. The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain.
Wikipedia

What is the creepiest Lovecraft creature? ›

Scariest: Cthulhu

Cthulhu is a giant creature with many squid-like tentacles. Depending on the artistic interpretation, he can appear as an octopus, a dragon, or other creatures.

What is Lovecraft horror called? ›

Lovecraftian horror, also called cosmic horror or eldritch horror, is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock. It is named after American author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937).

Was Lovecraft a pessimist? ›

Though cosmicism appears deeply pessimistic, Lovecraft thought of himself as neither a pessimist nor an optimist but rather a "scientific" or "cosmic" indifferentist, a theme expressed in his fiction.

What did Lovecraft say about cats? ›

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, civilised, master-class men.

What did Lovecraft call his gods? ›

Lovecraft made frequent references to the "Great Old Ones", a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth and have since fallen into a deathlike sleep.

Who did Lovecraft admire? ›

Lovecraft greatly admired Edgar Allan Poe and the tradition of Gothic horror founded by Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley. From Poe he further developed the psychology in horror. For his supernatural tendencies, Lovecraft was influenced by ghost stories from M.R. James.

What are the words of The Call of Cthulhu? ›

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. 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.

What is the cat quote Lovecraft? ›

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, civilised, master-class men.

What is the great old one quote? ›

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. 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.

What does the shoggoth say? ›

The cry “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” associated with the Shoggoth has its origins in another piece of literature. Lovecraft borrowed this phrase from Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 novel “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.”

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