Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

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.

Edgar Allan Poe
Science! true daughter of old Time thou art Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes! Why prey'st thou thus upon the poet's heart, Vulture! whose wings are dull realities!

Edgar Allan Poe
Scorching my seared heart with a pain, not hell shall make me fear again.

Edgar Allan Poe
The most natural, and, consequently, the truest and most intense of the human affections are those which arise in the heart as if by electric sympathy.

Edgar Allan Poe
If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by wind and spry together. They blind, deafen, and strangle you, and take away all power of action or reflection.

Edgar Allan Poe
Men of genius are far more abundant than is supposed. In fact, to appreciate thoroughly the work of what we call genius, is to possess all the genius by which the work was produced.

Edgar Allan Poe
The most 'popular,' the most 'successful' writers among us (for a brief period, at least) are, 99 times out of a hundred, persons of mere effrontery-in a word, busy-bodies, toadies, quacks.

Edgar Allan Poe
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.

Edgar Allan Poe
I shall always know what to answer, and my reply will be imposed upon me by the witness of my senses.

Edgar Allan Poe
Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become.

Edgar Allan Poe
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.

Edgar Allan Poe
As an individual, I myself feel impelled to fancy... a limitless succession of Universes.... Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God.

Edgar Allan Poe
To speak algebraically - Mr. M. is execrable, but Mr. C. is x plus 1-ecrable.

Edgar Allan Poe
I am actuated by an ambition which I believe to be an honourable one — the ambition of serving the great cause of truth, while endeavouring to forward the literature of the country.

Edgar Allan Poe
The great problem is at length solved! The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind.

Edgar Allan Poe
By the grey woods, by the swamp, where the toad and newt encamp, by the dismal tarns and pools, where dwell the Gouls. By each spot the most unholy, by each nook most melancholy, there the traveller meets, aghast, sheeted memories of the Past. Shrouded forms that start and sigh, as they pass the wanderer by. White-robed forms of friends long given; In agony, to the Earth - and Heaven.

Edgar Allan Poe
Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.

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

Edgar Allan Poe
A fearful instance of the ill consequences attending upon irascibility - alive, with the qualifications of the dead - dead, with the propensities of the living - an anomaly on the face of the earth - being very calm, yet breathless.

Edgar Allan Poe
I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the 'mountains & the woods'-the 'altars' of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.

Edgar Allan Poe
The mathematics are the science of form and quantity, mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity.

Edgar Allan Poe
A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet... yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.

Edgar Allan Poe
How much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the most appalling spectacles of inanimate matter.

Edgar Allan Poe
The unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting.

Edgar Allan Poe
"The nitre!" I said; "see, it increases. It hangs like moss upon the vaults. We are below the river's bed."

Edgar Allan Poe
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.

Edgar Allan Poe
The people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.

Edgar Allan Poe
The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment.

Edgar Allan Poe
By late accounts from Rotterdam, that city seems to be in a high state of philosophical excitement. Indeed, phenomena have there occurred of a nature so completely unexpected--so entirely novel--so utterly at variance with preconceived opinions--as to leave no doubt on my mind that long ere this all Europe is in an uproar, all physics in a ferment, all reason and astronomy together by the ears.

Edgar Allan Poe
There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime

Edgar Allan Poe