Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

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.

Edgar Allan Poe
I might refer at once, if necessary, to a hundred well authenticated instances. One of very remarkable character, and of which the circumstances may be fresh in the memory of some of my readers, occurred, not very long ago, in the neighboring city of Baltimore, where it occasioned a painful, intense, and widely extended excitement.

Edgar Allan Poe
By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.

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
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
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
The usual derivation of the word Metaphysics is not to be sustainedthe science is supposed to take its name from its superiority to physics. The truth is, that Aristotle's treatise on Morals is next in succession to his Book of Physics.

Edgar Allan Poe
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.

Edgar Allan Poe
As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would have been at the mercy of the Prefect.

Edgar Allan Poe
I design to speak of the Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical — of the Material and Spiritual Universe: — of its Essence, its Origin, its Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny.

Edgar Allan Poe
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
I can only speak with that species of indefinite definiteness which mathematicians are, at times, forced to put up with in certain algebraic formulae.

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
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