Edgar Allan Poe: Quotations



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Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity; and thrill; in waking; to find they have been upon the verge of the great secret.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity; and thrill; in waking; to find they have been upon the verge of the great secret.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: Eleonora

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: The Gold-Bug

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

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x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

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x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

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x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heartone of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: The Murders in the Rue Morgue

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: The Raven

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

To be thoroughly conversant with a man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

I have no faith in human perfectibility. 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.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

Full text of the quotation:If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own -- the road to immortal renown lies straight, open,...

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: A Dream Within A Dream

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused -- in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery -- by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press -- their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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.

Quotation taken from Edgar Allan Poe's essay "Th Poetic Principle", written toward the end of his life and published posthumously in 1850.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: The Poetic Principle

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

Quoth the raven, "Nevermore!"

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: The Raven

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany but of the soul.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

Most writers -- poets in especial -- prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy -- an ecstatic intuition -- and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes...

Most writers -- poets in especial -- prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy -- an ecstatic intuition -- and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and...

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: The Philosophy of Composition

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: A Few Words on Secret Writing

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! - tear up the planks! here, here! - It is the beating of his hideous heart!"

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: The Tell-Tale Heart

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):: Narrator

But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: Berenice

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: The Murders in the Rue Morgue

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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?

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: The Premature Burial

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.

x Author:: Edgar Allan Poe

x Source:: The Philosophy of Composition

x Spoken by character (if from fictional work):

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.

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be...