Top 389 Quotes & Sayings by Edgar Allan Poe - Page 3

[E]very plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points tend to the development of the intention.

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.

Thou wouldst be loved? - then let thy heart From its present pathway part not! Being everything which now thou art, Be nothing which thou art not. So with the world thy gentle ways, Thy grace, thy more than beauty, Shall be an endless theme of praise, And love - a simple duty.

All works of art should begin... at the end.

If you are ever drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations.

I have not only labored solely for the benefit of others (receiving for myself a miserable pittance), but have been forced to model my thoughts at the will of men whose imbecility was evident to all but themselves

Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries

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.

And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy dark eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams-- In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams!

When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect - they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul - not of intellect, or of heart.

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.

Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore - Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore! Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.

A mystery, and a dream, should my early life seem.

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted -- Nevermore!

I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.

In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found.

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

When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.

In death - no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?" This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" — Merely this, and nothing more

Sensations are the great things, after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations; they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.

That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences,) is indulged.

The sole purpose is to provide infinite springs, at which the soul may allay the eternal thirst TO KNOW which is forever unquenchable within it, since to quench it, would be to extinguish the soul's self.

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

Decorum -- that bug-bear which deters so many from bliss until the opportunity for bliss has forever gone by.

This maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

The reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.

I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.

A million candles have burned themselves out. Still I read on. (Montresor)

Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded.

In the Heaven's above, the angels, whispering to one another, can find, among their burning terms of love, none so devotional as that of 'Mother.

I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of golden sand- How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep- while I weep!

And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense? --now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.

The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.

Democracy is a very admirable form of government - for dogs

There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad humanity must assume the aspect of Hell.

Perversity is the human thirst for self-torture.

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.

In visions of the dark night I have dreamed of joy departed- But a waking dream of life and light Hath left me broken-hearted. Ah! what is not a dream by day To him whose eyes are cast On things around him with a ray Turned back upon the past? That holy dream- that holy dream, While all the world were chiding, Hath cheered me as a lovely beam A lonely spirit guiding. What though that light, thro' storm and night, So trembled from afar- What could there be more purely bright In Truth's day-star?

A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.

You call it hope-that fire of fire! It is but agony of desire.

If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.

The rain came down upon my head - Unshelter'd. And the wind rendered me mad and deaf and blind.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness.

That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.

I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.

It would be mockery to call such dreariness heaven at all.

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.

There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge.

A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, must not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.

And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot.

For years your name never passed my lips, while my soul drank in, with a delirious thirst, all that was uttered in my presence respecting you.

...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.

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man.

Ceux qui revent eveilles ont conscience de 1000 choses qui echapent a ceux qui ne revent qu'endormis. The one who has day dream are aware of 1000 things that the one who dreams only when he sleeps will never understand. (it sounds better in french, I do what I can with my translation...)

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As if some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--Only this and nothing more.

And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.

There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous--secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill will--we know that, in no case do they utter unbiased opinions of American books . . . we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland.