Once upon a Midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Happiness, Optimism, Expectation, Positive Attitudes
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
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
One half of the pleasure experienced at a theatre arises from the spectator’s sympathy with the rest of the audience, and, especially from his belief in their sympathy with him.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Acting
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
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
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
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
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Dreams
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
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
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
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
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.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Christianity, Christians
That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Coward, Cowardice
We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery—by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press—their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Journalism
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Beauty, Poetry, One liners
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 these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.
—Edgar Allan Poe
If you wish to forget something on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Memory
Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Beauty
After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Discovery
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Reality
In efforts to soar above our nature we invariably fall below it.
—Edgar Allan Poe
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
The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Tyranny
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
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: Thinking, Thoughts, Thought, Beauty
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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