Edgar Allan Poe quotes:

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

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.

The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.

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

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

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?

I have no faith in human perfectability. 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.

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

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

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

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

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.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

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

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

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.

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

But our love was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we Of many far wiser than we And neither the angels in heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.

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

That which you mistake for madness is but an overacuteness of the senses.

Who cares how time advances? I am drinking ale today.

In death - no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed."

For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique."

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea."

And so, all the night-tide, I lay down the side, of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, in the sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the surrounding sea."

It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma... which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.

There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad humanity must assume the aspect of Hell.

I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.

You need not attempt to shake off or to banter off Romance. It is an evil you will never get rid of to the end of your days. It is a part of yourself ... of your soul. Age will only mellow it a little, and give it a holier tone.

Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.

The best things in life make you sweaty.

The Bostonians are really, as a race, far inferior in point of anything beyond mere intellect to any other set upon the continent of North America. They are decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.

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

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

False hope is nicer than no hope at all.

A lie travels round the world while truth is putting her boots on.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

The believer is happy. The doubter is wise.

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 those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.

It may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve.

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.

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.

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

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

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

And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy dark eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams-- In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams!

For years your name never passed my lips, while my soul drank in, with a delirious thirst, all that was uttered in my presence respecting you....

In the deepest slumber-no! In delirium-no! In a swoon-no! In death-no! even in the grave all is not lost.

Believe me, there exists no such dilemma as that in which a gentleman is placed when he is forced to reply to a blackguard.

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

There are some qualities, some incorporate things, that have a double life, which thus is made. A type os twin entity which springs from matter and light, envinced in solid and shade.

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.

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 if some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--Only this and nothing more.

Read this and thought of you: Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say. ~ Edgar Allen Poe

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

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

It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood.

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.

I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted -- Nevermore!

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul.

The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.

And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.

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.

Dreams are the eraser dust I blow off my page. They fade into the emptiness, another dark gray day. Dreams are only memories of the plans I had back then. Dreams are eraser dust and now I use a pen.

Sensations are the great things, after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations; they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.

In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.

Villains!' I shrieked. 'Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Yes I now feel that it was then on that evening of sweet dreams- that the very first dawn of human love burst upon the icy night of my spirit. Since that period I have never seen nor heard your name without a shiver half of delight half of anxiety.

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.

The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age, since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information by throwing in the reader's way piles of lumber in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful matter, peradventure interspersed.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.

Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded...

I fell in love with melancholy

And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.

There are two bodies - the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call "death," is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.

The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.

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

Once upon a midnight dreary

I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy.

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

It would be mockery to call such dreariness heaven at all.

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.

I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore.

Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore - Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore! Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.

And the Raven, never flitting, Still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas Just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming Of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamplight o'er him streaming Throws his shadow on the floor, And my soul from out that shadow, That lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted - nevermore.

Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! By that Heaven that bends above us- by that God we both adore- Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore- Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore." Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore.

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor. "Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee-- Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!" Quothe the Raven, "Nevermore.

Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll!-a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?-weep now or nevermore!

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

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

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.

He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who ... shall ... persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.

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 reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities- that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration.

Tell a scoundrel, three or four times a day, that he is the pink of probity, and you make him at least the perfection of "respectability" in good earnest. On the other hand, accuse an honorable man, too petinaciously, of being a villain, and you fill him with a perverse ambition to show you that you are not altogether in the wrong.

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.

A gentleman with a pug nose is a contradiction in terms.

Boston: Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good.

The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability.

...the sole purpose is to provide infinite springs, at which the soul may allay the eternal thirst TO KNOW which is forever unquenchable within it, since to quench it, would be to extinguish the soul's self...

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting...

Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.

The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the wayof remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

Cigarettes and coffee an alcoholic's best friend

Filled with mingled cream and amber I will drain that glass again. Such hilarious visions clamber Through the chambers of my brain -- Quaintest thoughts -- queerest fancies Come to life and fade away; Who cares how time advances? I am drinking ale today