They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Imagination, Dreams
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Imagination
Because I feel that in the heavens above
The angels, whispering one to another,
Can find among their burning tears of love,
None so devotional as that of “Mother,”
Therefore, by that dear name I have long called you,
You who are more than mother unto me.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Mothers
No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter … than you and I; and all religion … is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Religion
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.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Difficulties, Adversity
In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Beauty, Thought, Thoughts, Thinking
Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.
—Edgar Allan Poe
I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Confidence
I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Opera
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.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Animals
Odors have an altogether peculiar force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight or the hearing.
—Edgar Allan Poe
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Poetry, Poets
It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Reason
Of a water that flows,
With a lullaby sound,
From a spring but a very few
Feet under ground—
From a cavern not very far
Down under ground.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Water
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.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Dying, Crises, Death
All that we see or seen is but a dream within a dream.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Illusion, Dreams
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Reality
Believe me, there exists no such dilemma as that in which a gentleman is placed when he is forced to reply to a blackguard.
—Edgar Allan Poe
The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.
—Edgar Allan Poe
We loved with a love that was more than love.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Romance, Love
I have no faith in human perfectibility. 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.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Perfection
To be thoroughly conversant with a man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Despair
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: One liners, Poetry, Beauty
To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Greatness, Slander, Insults
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Insanity, Sanity
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from the disease of thought—from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
—Edgar Allan Poe
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
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Philosophy
In efforts to soar above our nature we invariably fall below it.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Thomas Bailey Aldrich American Writer
- Marge Piercy American Poet
- Willa Cather American Novelist
- Edna St. Vincent Millay American Poet
- Walt Whitman American Poet
- Emily Dickinson American Poet
- John Greenleaf Whittier American Poet, Abolitionist
- Josiah Gilbert Holland American Editor, Novelist
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow American Poet
- Washington Allston American Artist, Writer
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