Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

We loved with a love that was more than love.

3327

The best things in life make you sweaty.

3611

And all I loved, I loved alone.

3061

From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.

3034

I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.

4029

Invisible things are the only realities.

4183

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

2612

The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.

1788

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

2130

Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.

1621

I have no words - alas! - to tell
The loveliness of loving well!

4553

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore.

2934

Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his health.

2096

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

4188

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

1687

Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?

4346

Philosophers have often held dispute
As to the seat of thought in man and brute
For that the power of thought attends the latter
My friend, thy beau, hath made a settled matter,
And spite of dogmas current in all ages,
One settled fact is better than ten sages. (O,Tempora! O,Mores!)

1451

If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being?

1235

I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

3559

It is a happiness to wonder; - it is a happiness to dream.

4636

How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? - from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born.

3627

Sleep, those little slices of death - how I loathe them.

4424

Even in the grave, all is not lost.

2494

True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.

3391

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!

3908

Lord help my poor soul.

2885

And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

1148

The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.

3915

You call it hope - that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire.

1818

Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
"On! on!" - but o'er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast.

2340

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

4052

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

2465

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.

2433

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore -
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

1333

Blood was its Avatar and its seal.

4938

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.

1057

By a route obscure and lonely
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule -
From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE, out of TIME.

2348

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but i feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

4484

I have been happy, though in a dream.
I have been happy-and I love the theme:
Dreams! in their vivid colouring of life
As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife

4174

And here, in thought, to thee-
In thought that can alone,
Ascend thy empire and so be
A partner of thy throne,
By winged Fantasy,
My embassy is given,
Till secrecy shall knowledge be
In the environs of Heaven.

3670

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

3374

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

3880

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

2368

I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.

4044

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

2129

I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down."

[Letter to J. Beauchamp Jones, August 8, 1839]

4920

There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.

4246

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

3111

In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.

1162

When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect - they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul - not of intellect, or of heart.

4675

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

1440

I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.

1670

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

1318

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

4016

Yet mad I am not...and very surely do I not dream.

4340

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.

1900

Chi sogna di giorno conosce molte cose che sfuggono a chi sogna solo di notte.

4100

Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life,
As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Of semblance with reality, which brings
To the delirious eye, more lovely things
Of Paradise and Love- and all our own!
Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.

4852

You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about money-finders.

2703

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not - they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

3009

Ah, not in knowledge is happiness, but in the acquisition of knowledge! In forever knowing, we are forever blessed; but to know all, were the curse of a fiend.

4433