Edgar Allan Poe Quotations

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

We loved with a love that was more than love.

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.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

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

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?

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

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

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.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

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

The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.

In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.

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.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient.

I have no faith in human perfectability. 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.

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

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.

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

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this - that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made - not to understand - but to feel - as crime.

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

Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

Indeed, there is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted.

To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.

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.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

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

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.

Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.

If you run out of ideas follow the road; you'll get there

The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls.

There is no beauty without some strangeness

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.

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.

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

Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore...

Leave my loneliness unbroken

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

Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.

All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.

Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.

I remained to much inside my head and ended up losing my mind

A lie travels round the world while truth is putting her boots on.

For years your name never passed my lips, while my soul drank in, with a delirious thirst, all that was uttered in my presence respecting you....

If a man deceives me once, shame on him; if he deceives me twice, shame on me.

And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.

And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense? --now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.

You need not attempt to shake off or to banter off Romance. It is an evil you will never get rid of to the end of your days. It is a part of yourself ... of your soul. Age will only mellow it a little, and give it a holier tone.

Sensations are the great things, after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations; they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.

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

Even in the grave, all is not lost.

It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood.

The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.

The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow

[E]very plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points tend to the development of the intention.

And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.

The most natural, and, consequently, the truest and most intense of the human affections are those which arise in the heart as if by electric sympathy.

A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.

Reality is the #1 cause of insanity among those who are in contact with it

In death - no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed.

...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.

Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.

Who cares how time advances? I am drinking ale today.

Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.

In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found.

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

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul.

To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!

No one should brave the underworld alone.

The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.

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

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

I dread the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results.

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.

A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.

Thank Heaven! The crisis /The danger is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last /, and the fever called ''Living'' is conquered at last.

The result of law inviolate is perfection–right–negative happiness. The result of law violate is imperfection, wrong, positive pain.

Fill with mingled cream and amber, I will drain that glass again. Such hilarious visions clamber Through the chamber of my brain — Quaintest thoughts — queerest fancies Come to life and fade away; What care I how time advances? I am drinking ale today.

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes - die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.

It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma... which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.

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 if some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--Only this and nothing more.

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