Edgar Allan Poe

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.

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

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

I have indeed no abhorrence of danger except in its absolute effect - in terror.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

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

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

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

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

With me poetry has not been a purpose but a passion.

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

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

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 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.

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.

There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.'

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary.

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

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

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?

To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.

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

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

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

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

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.

I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.

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

Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

It is the nature of truth in general as of some ores in particular to be richest when most superficial.

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.

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

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit, but the case of song-writing is I think one of the few.

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

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.

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.