Quotes from Edgar Allan Poe

In efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.

The grandeur that was Rome.

Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.

If a man deceives me once, shame on him; if he deceives me twice, shame on me.

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.

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

The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.

I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.

A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, must not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.

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.

Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors ... on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.

Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.

That the play is the tragedy, "Man," And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment.

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

I would define... the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.

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

The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.

Men of genius are far more abundant than is supposed. In fact, to appreciate thoroughly the work of what we call genius, is to possess all the genius by which the work was produced.

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

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.

Art is to look at not to criticize.

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