Quotes by Lovecraft

Life Sucks

Pretty Much HPL’s Best 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. 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 deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

—”The Call of Cthulhu”

A Hideous Thing

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.

—“Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family”

Mankind Is a Cosmic Joke

But I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest—the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

—”[In Defence of Dagon]: The Defence Remains Open!”, April 1921

Universal Suicide

It is good to be a cynic—it is better to be a contented cat—and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world—we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death—the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.“

— H.P. Lovecraft “Nietzscheism and Realism” from The Rainbow, Vol. I, No. 1 (October 1921); reprinted in “To Quebec and the Stars”, and also in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 71

Fear of the Unknown

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

—Supernatural Horror in Literature

Human Insignificance

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. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity—and terrestrialism at the threshold.

—Letter to Farnsworth Wright, 5 July 1927

Four decades earlier, in a 1935 letter to one of his correspondents, Lovecraft had written presciently of ‘the blind, indifferent cosmos, and the fortuitous, deterministically motivated automata who form a sort of momentary insect part on the surface of one of the least important of its temporary grains of dust.’

—Quoted in Jim Turner, “Cthulhu 2000,” in Cthulhu 2000 (2010: Random House). Unknown source.

[The indifferentist] alone of all thinkers is willing to view the future of the planet impartially—without assigning (as indeed there is absolutely no ground for assigning) any preponderance of evidential value to such factors as appear to argue a course pleasant to himself. Not that he is especially looking for anti-human outcomes, or that he has any pleasure in contemplating such. It is merely that, in judging evidence, he does not regard the quality of favourableness to man as any intrinsic mark of probability. Neither does he regard it as any intrinsic mark of improbability—he simply knows that this quality has nothing to do with the case; that the interplay of forces which govern climate, behavior, biological growth and decay, and so on, is too purely universal, cosmic, and eternal a phenomenon to have any relationship to the immediate wishing-phenomena of one minute organic species on our transient and insignificant planet. At times parts of this species may like the way things are going, and at times they may not—but that has nothing to do with the cosmically fixed march of the events themselves.

—”October 30, 1929,” in H.P. Lovecraft Selected Letters 1929-1931 (Vol. 3). Ed. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House Publishers, 1971.

On Writing

Characteristics

A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

—Supernatural Horror in Literature

Atmosphere

Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation.

—Supernatural Horror in Literature

Dread Is Essential

The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.

—Supernatural Horror in Literature

HPL’s Goal of Evoking the Cosmic

“I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.”

—“Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” in Amateur Correspondent, 2, No. 1 (May–June 1937), 7–10.

The True Function of Fantasy

“The true function of phantasy is to give the imagination a ground for limitless expansion, and to satisfy aesthetically the sincere and burning curiosity and sense of awe which a sensitive minority of mankind feel toward the alluring and provocative abysses of unplumbed space and unguessed entity which press in upon the known world from unknown infinities….”

—in HPL and CAS, Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2017).