Lovecraft: a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.
H. P. Lovecraft

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

What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!
H. P. Lovecraft

I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.
H. P. Lovecraft

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
H. P. Lovecraft

All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large.
H. P. Lovecraft

Personally, I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.
H. P. Lovecraft

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
H. P. Lovecraft

I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
H. P. Lovecraft

The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.
H. P. Lovecraft

A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone, and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep.
H. P. Lovecraft