Top 100 Edgar Poe Quotes
#2. Ear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation-to make a point-than to further the cause of truth." Dupin in "The Mystery of Marie Roget
Edgar Allan Poe
#3. all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling - my darling - my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea - In her tomb by the side of the sea.
Edgar Allan Poe
#6. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#7. 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
#8. The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
Edgar Allan Poe
#9. If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment ...
Edgar Allan Poe
#10. 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
#11. As I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current; if that appellation can properly be given to a tide, which, howling and shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract.
Edgar Allan Poe
#12. Thine image and--a name--a name!
Two separate--yet most intimate things.
Edgar Allan Poe
#13. I briefly considered doing Edgar Allan Poe and just swearing a lot.
Andy Richter
#14. The sky was the color of Edgar Allen Poe's pajamas.
Tom Robbins
#15. His heart is a suspended lute; As soon as you touch it, it resonates.
Edgar Allan Poe
#16. There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.
Edgar Allan Poe
#17. When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.
Marv Levy
#18. The greater amount of truth is impulsively uttered; thus the greater amount is spoken, not written.
Edgar Allan Poe
#19. The usual derivation of the word Metaphysics is not to be sustainedthe science is supposed to take its name from its superiority to physics. The truth is, that Aristotle's treatise on Morals is next in succession to his Book of Physics.
Edgar Allan Poe
#20. But it is a trait in the perversity of human nature to reject the obvious and the ready, for the far-distant and equivocal.
Edgar Allan Poe
#21. The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life & of the nineteenth century in general. (I am convinced that every thing is going wrong.)
Edgar Allan Poe
#23. A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.
Edgar Allan Poe
#24. Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age.
Mervyn Peake
#25. Yes, it would nice for this fifty year period, this cradle of all vampire short stories in the English language, to include a vampire tale by Edgar Allan Poe. But the sad answer is that Poe never penned a vampire story.
Andrew Barger
#26. Art was, for Poe, the only method by which one could penetrate the shapeless empirical world in the search for order, and
Edgar Allan Poe
#27. If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.
Edgar Allan Poe
#28. Poe isn't for everyone. He's too heady a draught for that. He may not be for you. But there are secrets to appreciating Poe, and I shall let you in on one of the most important ones: read him aloud
Neil Gaiman
#29. The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.
Edgar Allan Poe
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. You call it hope - that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire.
Edgar Allan Poe
#35. Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
Edgar Allan Poe
#36. It is a happiness to wonder;
it is a happiness to dream.
Edgar Allan Poe
#37. I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
Edgar Allan Poe
#38. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror.
Edgar Allan Poe
#39. The world is a great ocean, upon which we encounter more tempestuous storms than calms.
Edgar Allan Poe
#40. Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears [ ... ]
Edgar Allan Poe
#41. There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution.
Edgar Allan Poe
#42. You are a strange man, Mr. Poe." "So I've been told," Edgar said. "I'd rather be strange than boring. It's a flaw in my character.
David Niall Wilson
#43. By undue profundity, we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe
#44. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#45. Men of genius are far more abundant than is supposed. In fact, to appreciate thoroughly the work of what we call genius, is to possess all the genius by which the work was produced.
Edgar Allan Poe
#46. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
Edgar Allan Poe
#47. To see distinctly the machinery
the wheels and pinions
of any work of Art is, unquestionably, of itself, a pleasure, but one which we are able to enjoy only just in proportion as we do not enjoy the legitimate effect designed by the artist.
Edgar Allan Poe
#48. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#50. And so, all the night-tide, I lay down the side, of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, in the sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the surrounding sea.
Edgar Allan Poe
#52. Scorching my seared heart with a pain, not hell shall make me fear again.
Edgar Allan Poe
#53. It was horrible and senseless, and I now felt the sudden need to drink scotch, brood, and read Edgar Allen Poe or the ending to Hamlet. Maybe I would top it all off with some YouTube videos of drowning kittens while listening to Radiohead.
Penny Reid
#54. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#55. The raven of Edgar Allan Poe has a halo that he extinguishes from time to time
("Spanish Generosity")
Max Jacob
#56. A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.
Edgar Allan Poe
#57. The mass of the people regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea. In ratiocination, not less than in literature, it is the epigram which is the most immediately and the most universally appreciated. In both, it is of the lowest order of merit.
Edgar Allan Poe
#58. There is no exquisite beauty ... without some strangeness in the proportion.
Edgar Allan Poe
#59. But Psyche uplifting her finger said: Sadly this star I mistrust
Edgar Allan Poe
#60. In spite of the air of fablethe public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.
Edgar Allan Poe
#61. Mimes in the form of God on high mutter and mumble low and hither and tither fly, mere puppets they who come and go.
Edgar Allan Poe
#62. 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
#63. I heed not that my earthly lot Hath - little of Earth in it - That years of love have been forgot In the hatred of a minute: - I mourn not that the desolate Are happier, sweet, than I, But that you sorrow for my fate Who am a passer by.
Edgar Allan Poe
#64. I have not only labored solely for the benefit of others (receiving for myself a miserable pittance), but have been forced to model my thoughts at the will of men whose imbecility was evident to all but themselves
Edgar Allan Poe
#65. The past is a pebble in my shoe.
Poe
#66. There might be a class of beings, human once, but now to humanity invisible, for whose scrutiny, and for whose refined appreciation of the beautiful, more especially than for our own, had been set in order by God the great landscape-garden of the whole earth.
Edgar Allan Poe
#67. My favorite poem ever was 'Annabel Lee' by Edgar Allan Poe.
Ross Lynch
#68. Have been sufficient to establish its real character. Indeed, however
Edgar Allan Poe
#69. All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.
Edgar Allan Poe
#70. Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts! How often, Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its nature! How mysteriously did it act as a check to human bliss - saying unto it thus far, and no farther!
Edgar Allan Poe
#72. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#74. But, father, there liv'd one who, then, Then - in my boyhood - when their fire Burn'd with a still intenser glow (For passion must, with youth, expire)
Edgar Allan Poe
#75. Happiness is not to be found in knowledge, but in the acquisition of knowledge
Edgar Allan Poe
#77. [The daguerreotype] itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.
Edgar Allan Poe
#79. That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences,) is indulged.
Edgar Allan Poe
#81. I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.
Edgar Allan Poe
#82. Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!
Edgar Allan Poe
#84. I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.
Edgar Allan Poe
#85. My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design.
Edgar Allan Poe
#86. I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy.
Edgar Allan Poe
#87. When reason returned with the morning - when I had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch - I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched.
Edgar Allan Poe
#88. 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." ~ 'The Black Cat.
Edgar Allan Poe
#89. The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.
Edgar Allan Poe
#91. The reproduction of
what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.
Edgar Allan Poe
#93. It is the curse of a certain order of mind, that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing.Still less is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.
Edgar Allan Poe
#94. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
#95. No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human loveliness, do more than approach the living and breathing human beauty as it gladdens our daily path.
Edgar Allan Poe
#96. 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
#97. I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
Edgar Allan Poe
#98. I remember when I was very young, I had a fever - a long rheumatic fever in bed for four months. And in the days, I stayed alone with the maid. I only had my father's books with me. They were fantasy books about ghosts, and also books by Edgar Allen Poe that made a forever impression on me.
Dario Argento
#99. But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him desolate!)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed,
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
Edgar Allan Poe
#100. But, for myself, the Earth's records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization.
Edgar Allan Poe
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