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Quotes by Edgar Allan Poe


Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.
– Edgar Allan Poe
A gentleman with a pug nose is a contradiction in terms.
– 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
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
– Edgar Allan Poe
I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.
– Edgar Allan Poe
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.
– Edgar Allan Poe
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
I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
– Edgar Allan Poe
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
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.
– Edgar Allan Poe
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
Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.
– Edgar Allan Poe
That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.
– Edgar Allan Poe
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
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
The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
– Edgar Allan Poe
The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
– Edgar Allan Poe
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.
– Edgar Allan Poe
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
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
To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
– Edgar Allan Poe
We loved with a love that was more than love.
– Edgar Allan Poe
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.'
– Edgar Allan Poe
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow--
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Convinced myself, I seek not to convince.
– Edgar Allan Poe
There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
– Edgar Allan Poe
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.
– Edgar Allan Poe
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.
– Edgar Allan Poe
The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
– Edgar Allan Poe
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?
– Edgar Allan Poe
Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
– Edgar Allan Poe
It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.
– Edgar Allan Poe
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
– 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
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
– Edgar Allan Poe
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
– Edgar Allan Poe