Quotes by Edgar Allan Poe
Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror.
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
Stupidity is a talent for misconception.
It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.
If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.
The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.
The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
Odors have an altogether peculiar force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight or the hearing.
If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own -- the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple -- a few plain words -- My Heart Laid Bare. But -- this little book must be true to its title.
In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings, utterly vanished and forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few pertinaciously returning in, so to speak, upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative.
How much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the...
If the propositions of this Discourse are tenable, the "state of progressive collapse" is precisely that state in which alone we are warranted...
And so all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride...
Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.
In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.
For my own part, I have never had a though which I could not set down in words with even more distinctness than that which I conceived it.
