Quotes from Edgar Allan Poe

You call it hope-that fire of fire! It is but agony of desire.

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

There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime

I seemed to be upon the verge of comprehension, without the power to comprehend as men, at time, find themselves upon the brink of rememberance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

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

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.

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

The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.

The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.

Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

Even for those to whom life and death are equal jests. There are some things that are still held in respect.

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

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

[The daguerreotype] itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.

-ev'n with us the breath Of Science dims the mirror of our joy.

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

Life is for the strong, to be lived by the strong and if need be, taken by the strong. The weak were put on earth to give the strong pleasure.

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

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

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

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

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