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In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. The chance's of theism's truth being to my mind so microscopically small, I would be a pedant and a hypocrite to call myself anything else.

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
Mind
Theory
Theism
Would
Small
Hypocrite
Call
Agnostic
Chance
Practically
Provisionally
Else
Atheist
Pedant
Truth
Rational
Classed
Anything
Appearance
Pending
Must
Evidence
Pedants

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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
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The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.
H. P. Lovecraft
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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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Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
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The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
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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.
H. P. Lovecraft
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Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heros of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosis among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth!
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But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
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No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
H. P. Lovecraft
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The unknown ... became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part.
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Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects.
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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.
H. P. Lovecraft
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As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.
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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.
H. P. Lovecraft
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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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That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.
H. P. Lovecraft
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It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.
H. P. Lovecraft
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Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.
H. P. Lovecraft
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From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
H. P. Lovecraft
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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.
H. P. Lovecraft