Quotes By Edgar Allan Poe

There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.

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.

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

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.'

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

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

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

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

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

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

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.

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.

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

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

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

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

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

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

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

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

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

We loved with a love that was more than love.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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