Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

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My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design.

Edgar Allan Poe
Is there — is there balm in Gilead? — tell me — tell me, I implore!

Edgar Allan Poe
It is better to be a good deal prolix than even a very little obscure.

Edgar Allan Poe
I have before suggested that a genuine blackguard is never without a pocket-handkerchief.

Edgar Allan Poe
There might be a class of beings, human once, but now to humanity invisible, for whose scrutiny, and for whose refined appreciation of the beautiful, more especially than for our own, had been set in order by God the great landscape-garden of the whole earth.

Edgar Allan Poe
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.

Edgar Allan Poe
The greater amount of truth is impulsively uttered; thus the greater amount is spoken, not written.

Edgar Allan Poe
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.

Edgar Allan Poe
Many years ago, I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand. He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been wealthy; but a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want.

Edgar Allan Poe
It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.

Edgar Allan Poe
In me didst thou exist-and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.

Edgar Allan Poe
Wonders and wild fancies... strangely rife among mankind.

Edgar Allan Poe
Our telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us on every hand - notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the priesthood - that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty.

Edgar Allan Poe
In for ever knowing, we are for ever blessed; but to know all were the curse of a fiend

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

Edgar Allan Poe
If I could dwell where Israfel hath dwelt and he where I he might not sing so wildly well a mortal melody while a bolder note then this might swell from my lyre in the sky.

Edgar Allan Poe
The higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess.

Edgar Allan Poe
For the question is of will, and not, as the insanity of logic has assumed of power. It is not that the Deity cannot modify his laws, but that we insult him in imagining a possible necessity for modification. In their origin these laws were fashioned to embrace all contingencies which could lie in the future. With God all is Now.

Edgar Allan Poe
We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal

Edgar Allan Poe
Matter exists only as Attraction and Repulsion - in other words that Attraction and Repulsion are matter...

Edgar Allan Poe
This - all this - was in the olden Time long ago.

Edgar Allan Poe
It is the curse of a certain order of mind, that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing.Still less is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.

Edgar Allan Poe
I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make; and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see.

Edgar Allan Poe
I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life - except in hope, which is by no means bankable.

Edgar Allan Poe
Telescopic observations, guided by the laws of perspective, enable us to understand that the perceptible Universe exists as a roughly spherical cluster of clusters irregularly disposed.

Edgar Allan Poe