Famous Edgar Allan Poe Quotations

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"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"All that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Convinced myself, I seek not to convince."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."
by Ralph Ellison
"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity"
by Edgar Allan Poe
"I have great faith in fools; self-confidence, my friends call it."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"I have great faith in fools -- self confidence my friends call it."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"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."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Never to suffer would never to have been blessed."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Scorching my seared heart with a pain, not hell shall make me fear again."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Sleep, those little slices of death; Oh how I loathe them."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Sleep, those little slices of death, how I loathe them."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Take this kiss upon the brow And, in parting from you now,Thus much let me avow--You are not wrong who deemThat my days have been a dreamYet if hope has flown awayIn a night, or in a day,In a vision, or in none,Is it therefore the less goneAll that we see or seemIs but a dream within a dream."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"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."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"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."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"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."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"To be thoroughly conversant with a man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before"
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow-- You are not wrong who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings, utterly vanished and forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few pertinaciously returning in, so to speak, upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so."
by 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."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own -- the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple -- a few plain words -- My Heart Laid Bare. But -- this little book must be true to its title."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Sleep. Those little slices of Death. How I loathe them."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"A lunatic may be"
by Edgar Allan Poe
"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."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Of a water that flows, With a lullaby sound, From a spring but a very few Feet under ground -- From a cavern not very far Down under ground."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"All that we see or seen Is but a dream within a dream."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"For my own part, I have never had a though which I could not set down in words with even more distinctness than that which I conceived it."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"'Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise. 'But waft the angel on her flight with a paean of old days!..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"'Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, 'art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shor..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor...."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll!—a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"And we passed to the end of a vista, But were stopped by the door of a tomb—..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"And so all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"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..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of 'dead! dead!' absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the suf..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Far in the forest, dim and old, For her may some tall vault unfold—"
by Edgar Allan Poe
"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..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"If the propositions of this Discourse are tenable, the 'state of progressive collapse' is precisely that state in which alone we are warranted..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"If I venture to displace ... the microscopical speck of dust... on the point of my finger,... I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her ..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea,..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors ... on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer t..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"My love—my faith—should instil into your bosom a praeternatural calm. You would rest from care.... You would get better.... And if not, He..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a ..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Nor had I erred in my calculations—nor had I endured in vain. I at length felt that I was free."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"She was a child and I was a child, In this kingdom by the sea,..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Semi-Saracenic architecture, sustaining itself as if by miracle in mid air; glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred oriels, minarets, an..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Resignedly beneath the sky The melancholy waters lie...."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Some sepulcher, remote, alone, Against whose portal she hath thrown,..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"Thank Heaven! the crisis — The danger, is past,..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"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?"
by Edgar Allan Poe
"The death ... of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep, Which is enduring, so be deep! Heaven have her in its sacred keep!"
by Edgar Allan Poe
"The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure ...: buffoons,... improvisatori,... ballet-dancers,... musicians,... Beauty,... wine. A..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"The painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought;... he grew tremulous and ... crying with a loud voice, 'This is indeed Life ..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"The waves have now a redder glow— The hours are breathing faint and low—..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"the wind came out of the cloud chilling And killing my Annabel Lee."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"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 ..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"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 v..."
by Edgar Allan Poe
"You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou ... dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist—and, in my ..."
by Edgar Allan Poe


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