Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Substance
Illusion
Shadow
Call
Reality

More quotes by H. P. Lovecraft

Image
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.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
Vigorous let us be in attaining our ends, and mild in our method of attainment.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
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
Image
There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
I'll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into - something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
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.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
Zoologists seem to consider the cerebration of cats and dogs about 50-50 -- but my respect always goes to the cool, sure, impersonal, delicately poised feline who minds his business and never slobbers.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
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.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
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
Image
I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
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.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
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
Image
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