Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

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

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.

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Thy soul shall find itself alone ’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone— Not one, of all the crowd, to pry Into thine hour of secrecy. Be silent in that solitude, Which is not loneliness—for then The spirits of the dead who stood In life before thee are again In death around thee—and their will Shall overshadow thee: be still. [...]

I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.

Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become.

Believe me, there exists no such dilemma as that in which a gentleman is placed when he is forced to reply to a blackguard.

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.

When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.

Deep in earth my love is lying And I must weep alone.

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

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.

The Bostonians are really, as a race, far inferior in point of anything beyond mere intellect to any other set upon the continent of North America. They are decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive.

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

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.

Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.

Every moment of the night Forever changing places And they put out the star-light With the breath from their pale faces

True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had haunted my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Of all the sense of hearing acute.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil.

Imperceptibly the love of these discords grew upon me as my love of music grew stronger.

[E]very plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points tend to the development of the intention.

THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled --but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his health.

There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous--secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill will--we know that, in no case do they utter unbiased opinions of American books . . . we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland.

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.

There is no beauty without some strangeness

Once upon a midnight dreary

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.

Always keep a big bottle of booze at your side. If a bird starts talking nonsense to you in the middle of the night pour yourself a stiff drink.

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter than you and I.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

It is with literature as with law or empire - an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.

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.

He is, as you say, a remarkable horse, a prodigious horse, although as you very justly observe, a suspicious and untractable character.

A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.

If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by wind and spry together. They blind, deafen, and strangle you, and take away all power of action or reflection.

In the Heaven's above, the angels, whispering to one another, can find, among their burning terms of love, none so devotional as that of 'Mother.

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!

In the marginalia ... we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly - boldly - originally - with abandonment - without conceit.

I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.