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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

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H. P. Lovecraft
Age: 46 †
Born: 1890
Born: August 20
Died: 1937
Died: March 15
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Providence
Rhode Island
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
H.P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft
Ward Phillips
HP Lovecraft
Richard Raleigh
Edgar Softly
Augustus T. Swift
Lewis Theobald
Jr.
Albert Frederick Willie
Humphrey Littlewit
Better
Folly
Disown
Nothing
Laugh
Pretensions
Never
Expect
Contemptible
Men
Outside
Pretension
Laughing
Attained
Race
Weep
Within
Expecting
Universe
Compared

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Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
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And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.
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The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.
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I am perfectly confident that I could never adequately convey to any other human being the precise reasons why I continue to refrain from suicide - the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthensome quality.
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I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either. I would as soon do the one as the other sort of thing--it is all a matter of harmony and good taste.
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We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.
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Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.
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Truly, there are terrible primal arcana of earth which had better be left unknown and unevoked dread secrets which have nothing to do with man, and which man may learn only in exchange for peace and sanity cryptic truths which make the knower evermore an alien among his kind, and cause him to walk alone on earth.
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My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time.
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So far as English versification is concerned, Pope was the world, and all the world was Pope.
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In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.
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I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.
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No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
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Though not a participant in the Business of life I am, like the character of Addison and Steele, an impartial (or more or less impartial) Spectator, who finds not a little recreation in watching the antics of those strange and puny puppets called men.
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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.
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Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises.
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Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.
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That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.
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Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.
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It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.
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