If you’re a fan of the macabre, your favourite horror films and television shows probably owe a lot to the Doctor of the Demented, H.P. Lovecraft. Famed for bringing an original (and often unsettling) edge to literature, his influence is obvious on modern media.

Today (August 20th) would have marked his 125th birthday, so to celebrate, we Cultured Vultures decided to round up some of his best quotes for your interest:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

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

Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.

“At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.”

“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.”

“Religion is still useful among the herd – that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else…”

“There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.”

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.

“The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.”

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

“Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.”

“It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.”

“To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.”