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In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

H. P. Lovecraft#3

Cosmic horrorPhilosophyPerceptionPsychologyRealityMadnessMaterialismSanity

About this quote

What does it mean?
The narrator acknowledges that their confinement in an asylum may make others doubt their story, as most people lack the mental capacity to understand phenomena beyond common experience.
In plain terms
Most people are too limited to understand experiences that fall outside their ordinary reality.
What can you take from it?
Trust sensitive perceptions even when others dismiss them as madness.

Where it applies

  • reading fiction
  • interpreting mental health
  • questioning norms

Putting it to work

  • validating unusual experiences
  • challenging skepticism

Questions to consider

  • How do you know what is real?
  • Who decides what counts as madness?

Another view

Not all claims outside common experience are valid or sane.

More from H. P. Lovecraft

  1. The best critics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demand perfect rhyming, and no aspirant for fame can afford to depart from a standard so universal. …

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  2. I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and gr…

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  3. The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, g…

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