Edgar Allan Poe
114 quotes
Biography
"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
"We loved with a love that was more than love."
"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."
"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
"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.'"
"I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it."
"I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched."
"There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion."
"I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom."
"Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear."
"From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone."
"Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them."
"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."
"The best things in life make you sweaty."
"It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream."
"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."
"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?"
"Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears."
"Invisible things are the only realities."
"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."
"And all I loved, I loved alone."
"The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world."
"Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words."
"To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary."
"The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true."