Edgar Allan Poe famous quotes

...that fitful strain of melancholy which will ever be found inseperable from the perfection of the beautiful.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Beautiful #Perfection #Melancholy

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Inspirational #Life #Clever

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Writing #Insightful #Stories

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

#Rain #Fall #Night

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.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Mistake #Heart #Men

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.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Depression #Spring #Science

Leave my loneliness unbroken
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Loneliness #Unbroken

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.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Soul #Body #Flight

Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Truth #Halloween #Believe

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

#Should #Sheets #Guinea

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

#Agony #Long #Soul

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

#Dream #Men #Profound

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.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Love #Heart #Sacrifice

I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Heart #Insane #Mental Health

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

#Sweet #Musical #Fancy

There is no beauty without some strangeness
-- Edgar Allan Poe

The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Soul #Monsters

I fell in love with melancholy
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Melancholy

And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Love #Inspirational #Life

Me volví loco, con largos intervalos de horrible cordura.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Horrible

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

#Life #Happiness #Real

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

#Weakness #Atrocities #Causes

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

#Reality #Air #Narrative

Tell a scoundrel, three or four times a day, that he is the pink of probity, and you make him at least the perfection of "respectability" in good earnest. On the other hand, accuse an honorable man, too petinaciously, of being a villain, and you fill him with a perverse ambition to show you that you are not altogether in the wrong.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Revenge #Ambition #Men

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.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Rap #Doors #Midnight

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Inspirational #Life #Dream

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

#Heartbreak #I Hate You #Way

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?
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Inspirational #Life #Death

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

#Criticism #Purpose #Literature

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.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Funny #Pain #Memories

I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Atmosphere #Sorrow #Melancholy

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.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Love #Heart #Loss

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

#Life #Friendship #Confidence

Democracy is a very admirable form of government - for dogs
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Dog #Government #Democracy

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Midnight #Literature #Weak

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Beauty #Thoughtful #Poetry

All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Attachment #Suffering #Desire

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Writing #Thoughtful #Reality

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Inspirational #Life #Cat

I remained to much inside my head and ended up losing my mind
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Mind #Losing

Deep in earth my love is lying And I must weep alone.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Sad #Lying #Love Is

I dread the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Events #Results #Dread

Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Love #Life #Marriage

Even in the grave, all is not lost.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Lost #Graves

Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore...
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Heart #Mystery #Moments

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Soul #Poetry Is

Convinced myself, I seek not to convince.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Convince

I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Ideas #Meditation #Mind

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.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Sight #Odor #Peculiar

One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; — hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; — hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; — hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin — a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it — if such a thing were possible — even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Morning #Eye #Heart

Invisible things are the only realities.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Halloween #Reality #Invisible

The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Struggle #Player #Mind

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.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Inspiring #Death #Past

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

#Memories #Long #Remembrance

As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Strong #Exercise #Men

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

#Purpose #Fiction #Certain

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Passion #Poetry #Purpose

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

#Able #Said #Pun

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.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Dream #Mean #Thinking

And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy dark eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams-- In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams!
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Love #Dream #Eye

If you run out of ideas follow the road; you'll get there
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Running #Persistence #Ideas

Indeed, there is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Enthusiasm #Eloquence #Doubted

In the deepest slumber-no! In delirium-no! In a swoon-no! In death-no! even in the grave all is not lost.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Slumber #Delirium #Lost

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Thoughtful #Intelligence #Taught

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Men #Mad #Insanity

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

#Communication #Thoughtful #Silence

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

#Beauty #Fall #Carpe Diem

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.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Wise #Wisdom #Men

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

#Love #Inspirational #Life

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

#Imagination #Literature #Facts

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

#Thoughtful #Ideas #Music Is

Yet mad I am not...and very surely do I not dream.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Dream #Mad #Sanity

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

#May #Resolve #Enigma

It is a happiness to wonder; -- it is a happiness to dream.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Dream #Wonder

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Beauty #Sole

No one should brave the underworld alone.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Brave #Should #Underworld

And all I loved, I loved alone.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

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

#Sarcasm #Misunderstood #Want

There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Beautiful #Might #Littles

The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Ratios #Goodness #Wit

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

#Thoughtful #Reality #Superficial

I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Literature #Danger #Terror

The reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Soul #Veils #Perceive

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.'
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Art #Nature #Men

In me didst thou exist-and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Thyself

There are two bodies - the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call "death," is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Death #Butterfly #Two

Yes I now feel that it was then on that evening of sweet dreams- that the very first dawn of human love burst upon the icy night of my spirit. Since that period I have never seen nor heard your name without a shiver half of delight half of anxiety.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Dream #Sweet #Night

Who cares how time advances? I am drinking ale today.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Drinking #Beer #Who Cares

A million candles have burned themselves out. Still I read on. (Montresor)
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Burned #Stills #Candle

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.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Drinking #Glasses #Alcohol

There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Heart #Emotion #Reckless

We gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Dream #Wind #World

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Stupid #Silly #Ignorance

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

#Inspirational #Life #Religious

We loved with a love that was more than love.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Love #Marriage #Best Love

The rain came down upon my head - Unshelter'd. And the wind rendered me mad and deaf and blind.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Rain #Wind #Mad

The past is a pebble in my shoe.
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Past #Shoes #Legacy

Villains!' I shrieked. 'Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!
-- Edgar Allan Poe

#Heart #Guilt #Tears

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

#Life #Dream #Inspiration