306 Quotes by H. P. Lovecraft

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'. Only egotism exists.

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me ...

I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups--(a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logic. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities.

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

All great humorists are sad.... 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.

The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat--especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral.