The best phrases by HP Lovecraft

Be surprised by the best phrases from HP Lovecraft, a master of horror with a tortured and lucid mind.

Between the best phrases of HP Lovecraftfar from thinking of a tortured mind capable of creating horrifying and suffocating universes, we can also find lucid quotes famous for the wisdom they hide.

HP Lovecraft had a short-lived writing career, interrupted by his premature death at age 47. However, his ability to dream dystopias and imagine science fiction and horror It has marked a good number of readers around the world in the last century.

That being said, how about we delve into the depths of the tortured author’s brain? Some of HP Lovecraft’s famous phrases are largely a faithful reflection that the society in which he lived and his way of seeing the world, which is very interesting.

The bad life

“Death is merciful, since there is no return from it; but for him who returns from the deepest chambers of the night, lost and conscious, there will be no more peace.”

For HP Lovecraft, death was the end. However, he considered that people who practiced a bad life, focused on alcohol, vice and nightlife understood from a mentality of the early 20th century, were tortured and persecuted beings who only found peace after death.

The power of the will

“May the merciful gods, if they exist, protect those hours when no power of will, nor drugs invented by the ingenuity of man, can keep me away from the abyss of sleep!”

HP Lovecraft did not believe that the will was capable of fighting against certain elements. In this phrase he refers to dreams, but he also talks about drugs capable of distancing us from reality.

The empiricism of winning people

“The most broad-minded men know that there is no clear distinction between the real and the unreal; that all things seem what they seem only by virtue of the delicate psychic and mental instruments of each individual, thanks to which we come to know them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of clairvoyance that pierce the common veil of clear empiricism.”

This long phrase has a surprising complexity inside. It is possible that the tortured author means that only clairvoyant and open-minded people are able to understand that everything varies depending on the personality of the viewer.

Perhaps that is why a large majority is condemned to live in materialism rather than trying to see something as it is, which could only be reached through experience and empiricism.

The fear

“The oldest and most intense emotion of humanity is fear, and the oldest and most intense of fears is the fear of the unknown.”

HP Lovecraft knew very soon the importance of fear in human beings. In fact, he exploited this emotion like few others without which we would not have survived. And we are talking about a tool that allows us to be more sensible and restrained, acting with common sense in the face of the unknown and the dangerous, prioritizing our own survival.

Be yourself

“Neither death, nor fate, nor anxiety can produce the unbearable despair that results from losing one’s identity.”

Another of Lovecraft’s great obsessions was stay true to yourself. Despite the headaches and misfortunes that something like this brought him, he tried not to lose his true identity at any time, always knowing who he was, for the good, but also for the bad.

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Lovecraft in its purest form

“Men of science suspect something about that world, but they ignore almost everything. “The wise interpret dreams, and the gods laugh.”

We end with one of HP Lovecraft’s phrases that describe his complex personality in its purest form. How to interpret this quote? Here you see his fears for the power of the great gods, his passion for the interpretation of dreams, and his strange beliefs about science and research. What did he really mean? Only he would know…