It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

I could not help feeling that they were evil things -- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.

It is good to be a cynic - it is better to be a contented cat - and it is best not to exist at all.

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

That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.