Top 100 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes
#2. I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
Edgar Allan Poe
#3. The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
Edgar Allan Poe
#4. And his brow was lofty with thought, and his eye wild with care; and, in the few furrows upon his cheek I read the fables of sorrow, and weariness, and disgust with mankind, and a longing after solitude.
Edgar Allan Poe
#6. A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.
Edgar Allan Poe
#7. And, though my faith be broken,
And, though my heart be broken,
Here is a ring, as token
That I am happy now!
Edgar Allan Poe
#8. The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the wayof remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.
Edgar Allan Poe
#9. The Romans worshipped their standard; and the Roman standard happened to be an eagle. Our standard is only one tenth of an eagle,
a dollar, but we make all even by adoring it with tenfold devotion.
Edgar Allan Poe
#12. As for Republicanism, no analogy could be found for it upon the face of the earth - unless we except the case of the "prairie dogs," an exception which seems to demonstrate, if anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government - for dogs.
Edgar Allan Poe
#13. [The daguerreotype] itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.
Edgar Allan Poe
#14. Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!
Edgar Allan Poe
#15. The reproduction of
what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.
Edgar Allan Poe
#17. 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 most appalling spectacles of inanimate matter.
Edgar Allan Poe
#20. The rain came down upon my head - Unshelter'd. And the wind rendered me mad and deaf and blind.
Edgar Allan Poe
#21. It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.
Edgar Allan Poe
#22. That which you mistake for madness is but an overacuteness of the senses.
Edgar Allan Poe
#23. To him, who still would gaze upon the glory of the summer sun, there comes, when that sun will from him part, a sullen hopelessness of heart.
Edgar Allan Poe
#24. Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become.
Edgar Allan Poe
#26. The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.
Edgar Allan Poe
#27. The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, - not the material of my every-day existence
but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.
Edgar Allan Poe
#28. Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
Edgar Allan Poe
#29. Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.
Edgar Allan Poe
#30. The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow.
Edgar Allan Poe
#31. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#32. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#33. Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool."
"True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, "although I have been guilty of certain doggerel myself.
Edgar Allan Poe
#34. Believe me, there exists no such dilemma as that in which a gentleman is placed when he is forced to reply to a blackguard.
Edgar Allan Poe
#35. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#36. Horrors of a nature most stern and most appalling would too frequently obtrude themselves upon my mind, and shake the innermost depths of my soul with the bare supposition of their possibility.
Edgar Allan Poe
#37. And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.
Edgar Allan Poe
#38. In his opinion the powers of the intellect held intimate connection with the capabilities of the stomach.
Edgar Allan Poe
#39. And thus thy memory is to me
Like some enchanted far-off isle
In some tumultuous sea
Some ocean throbbing far and free
With storms - but where meanwhile
Serenest skies continually
Just o'er that one bright island smile.
Edgar Allan Poe
#40. We gave him a hearty welcome, for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man..
Edgar Allan Poe
#41. As an individual, I myself feel impelled to fancy ... a limitless succession of Universes ... Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God.
Edgar Allan Poe
#42. I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.
Edgar Allan Poe
#43. Some human memories and tearful lore, Render him terrorless: his name's No More.
Edgar Allan Poe
#44. Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
Edgar Allan Poe
#45. It may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve.
Edgar Allan Poe
#46. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#47. Even for those to whom life and death are equal jests. There are some things that are still held in respect.
Edgar Allan Poe
#48. If the propositions of this Discourse are tenable, the "state of progressive collapse" is precisely that state in which alone we are warranted in considering All Things.
Edgar Allan Poe
#49. Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.
Edgar Allan Poe
#51. The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.
Edgar Allan Poe
#52. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#53. 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
Edgar Allan Poe
#54. It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.
Edgar Allan Poe
#59. In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.
Edgar Allan Poe
#60. Let him talk," said Dupin, who had not thought it necessary to reply. "Let him discourse; it will ease his conscience, I a satisfied with having defeated him in his own castle.
Edgar Allan Poe
#61. All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
Edgar Allan Poe
#62. O craving heart, for the lost flowers/ And sunshine of my summer hours!/ The undying voice of that dead time,/ With its interminable chime,/ Rings in the spirit of a spell, / Upon thy emptiness
a knell. / I have not always been as now:
Edgar Allan Poe
#63. Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore ...
Edgar Allan Poe
#64. All around were horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering desert of ebony.
Edgar Allan Poe
#65. If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being?
Edgar Allan Poe
#66. I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.
Edgar Allan Poe
#67. And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms, that move fantastically
To a discordant melody,
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh - but smile no more.
Edgar Allan Poe
#68. Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Edgar Allan Poe
#69. The agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.
Edgar Allan Poe
#71. The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.
Edgar Allan Poe
#72. The question is of will, and not, as the insanity of logic has assumed, of power. It is not that the Deity cannot modify his laws, but that we insult him in imagining a possible necessity for modification.
Edgar Allan Poe
#73. For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.
Edgar Allan Poe
#74. I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
Edgar Allan Poe
#75. Sleep, those little slices of death - how I loathe them.
Edgar Allan Poe
#76. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth.I heard many things in hell.
Edgar Allan Poe
#77. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#78. All we see or seem is but a dream within a dream...," Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
#79. The convex surface of any segment of a sphere is, to the entire surface of the sphere itself, as the versed sine of the segment to the diameter of the sphere.
Edgar Allan Poe
#80. The higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess.
Edgar Allan Poe
#81. The teeth! - the teeth! - they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development.
Edgar Allan Poe
#83. Did there not cross your mind some thought of the physical power of words? Is not every word an impulse on the air?
Edgar Allan Poe
#84. The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.
Edgar Allan Poe
#85. And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?
Edgar Allan Poe
#86. Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.
Edgar Allan Poe
#89. He is, as you say, a remarkable horse, a prodigious horse, although as you very justly observe, a suspicious and untractable character.
Edgar Allan Poe
#90. I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.
Edgar Allan Poe
#91. I am walking like a bewitched corpse, with the certainty of being eaten by the infinite, of being annulled by the only existing Absurd.
Edgar Allan Poe
#92. If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.
Edgar Allan Poe
#93. If I could dwell where Israfel hath dwelt and he where I he might not sing so wildly well a mortal melody while a bolder note then this might swell from my lyre in the sky.
Edgar Allan Poe
#94. Where was your all-loving god when he was really needed?
Edgar Allan Poe
#95. One half of the pleasure experienced at a theatre arises from the spectator's sympathy with the rest of the audience, and, especially from his belief in their sympathy with him.
Edgar Allan Poe
#96. As a viewed myself in a fragment of looking-glass ... , I was so impressed with a sense of vague awe at my appearance ... that I was seized with a violent tremour.
Edgar Allan Poe
#97. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results.
Edgar Allan Poe
#98. And then I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at the glittering death, as a child at some rare bauble.
Edgar Allan Poe
#99. I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but he quenched it in misery.
Edgar Allan Poe
#100. To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!
Edgar Allan Poe
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