H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

Calculate what man knows and it cannot compare to what he doesn't know. Calculate the time he is alive and it cannot compare to the time before he was born. Yet man takes something so small and tries to exhaust the dimensions of something so large!

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

Of power does Man possess no particle: Of knowledge-just so much as show that still It ends in ignorance on every side.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.

I don't think it's meant for man to know everything at once.

I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.

Even great spirits have only their five-fingers' breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

We mortals hear only the news, and know nothing at all.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

We're blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know.

While some of us may know than others about certain things, it is the thinnest slice of all that is, or could be known. In that sense, we are all profoundly ignorant.

All that we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown.

There are two things that are infinite: The universe and human folly. And sometimes I am not sure about the universe.

Like an ostrich with its head in the sand, we humans have repeatedly assumed that all we could see was all that existed, hubristically imagining ourselves at the center of everything. In our quest to understand the cosmos, underestimation has thus been a persistent theme.

Zhuangzi is especially insightful about the human pretension to know. The Zhuangzi tells a story about a frog who lives in caved-in well. Because he is the lord of this little world of his, king of the pollywogs, he is very proud of himself. But he doesn't know how small his world is until a turtle comes and tells him about the vastness of the sea. We human beings are like the frog, not realizing how little our worlds are.

It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.

Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory - the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended.

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.

Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate the nearer we arrive unto it. For what do we truly know, or what can we clearly affirm, of any one of those important things upon which all our reasonings must of necessity be built--time and space, life and death, matter and mind?

What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.

It's impossible for one person to think of everything.

The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.

The more we know, the better we realize that our knowledge is a little island in the midst of an ocean of ignorance.