Edgar Allan Poe

“As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.”

“Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.”

“To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair”

“You call it hope — that fire of fire!It is but agony of desire.”

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”

“The principle of vis inertiae (...) seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed, and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress”

“The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow.”

“All that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream.”

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

“And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into recesses if his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom.”

“Twas noontide of summer,And mid-time of night;And stars, in their orbits,Shone pale, thro' the lightOf the brighter, cold moon,'Mid planets her slaves,Herself in the Heavens,Her beam on the waves.I gazed awhileOn her cold smile;Too cold–too cold for me-There pass'd, as a shroud,A fleecy cloud,And I turned away to thee,Proud Evening Star,In thy glory afar,And dearer thy beam shall be;For joy to my heartIs the proud partThou bearest in Heaven at night,And more I admireThy distant fire,Than that colder, lowly light.”

“If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being?”

“I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.”

“Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.”

“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.”

“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.”

“By a route obscure and lonelyHaunted by ill angels only,Where an eidolon, named NIGHT,On a black throne reigns upright,I have reached these lands but newlyFrom an ultimate dim Thule --From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime,Out of SPACE, out of TIME.”

“It all depends on the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber. - Daupin”

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.”

“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.”