Quotes by Robert E. Howard

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.

I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Croms realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimers Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Over the souls of men spread the condor wings of colossal monsters and all manner of evil things prey upon the heart and soul and body of Man. Yet it may be in some far day the shadows shall fade and the Prince of Darkness be chained forever in his hell. And till then mankind can but stand up stoutly to the monsters in his own heart and without, and with the aid of God he may yet triumph.

Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars.

The Lion banner sways and falls in the horror-haunted gloom;A scarlet Dragon rustles by, borne on winds of doom.In heaps the shining horsemen lie, where the thrusting lances break,And deep in the haunted mountains, the lost, black gods awake.Dead hands grope in the shadows, the stars turn pale with fright,For this is the Dragons Hour, the triumph of Fear and Night.

What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky.The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;Rush in and die, dogs—I was a man before I was a king.

Gleaming shell of an outworn lie; fable of Right divine—You gained your crowns by heritage, but Blood was the price of mine.The throne that I won by blood and sweat , by Crom, I will not sellFor promise of valleys filled with gold, or threat of the Halls of Hell!

It is only the promise of death that makes life worth living.

Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.

All fled—all done, so lift me on the pyre—The Feast is over, and the lamps expire.

It was no ape, neither was it a man. It was some shambling horror spawned in the mysterious, nameless jungles of the south, where strange life teemed in the reeking rot without the dominance of man, and drums thundered in temples that had never known the tread of a human foot.

How can I wear the harness of toilAnd sweat at the daily round,While in my soul foreverThe drums of Pictdom sound?

Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally - oh, very rarely! - the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph

My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. Theyre rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!