Quotes from Edgar Allan Poe

Each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

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.

I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.

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

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

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?

There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified—more supremely noble than this very poem—this poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for the poem's sake.

Keeping time, time, time,In a sort of Runic rhyme,To the tintinnabulation that so musically wellsFrom the bells, bells, bells, bells,Bells, bells, bells.

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.

While from a proud tower in the townDeath looks gigantically down.

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

The viol, the violet, and the vine.

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.

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,The Elfin from the green grass, and from meThe summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

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.

In her sepulcher there by the sea—In her tomb by the sounding sea.

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

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

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sittingOn the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.

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

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

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

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

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!"