Edgar Allan Poe Quotes
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Believe me, there exists no such dilemma as that in which a gentleman is placed when he is forced to reply to a blackguard.
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Thy soul shall find itself alone ’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone— Not one, of all the crowd, to pry Into thine hour of secrecy. Be silent in that solitude, Which is not loneliness—for then The spirits of the dead who stood In life before thee are again In death around thee—and their will Shall overshadow thee: be still.
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We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal...
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I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.
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Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!
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You call it hope-that fire of fire! It is but agony of desire.
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I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.
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Yes, Heaven is thine; but thisIs a world of sweets and sours;Our flowers are merely-flowers.
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And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.
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To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair...
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Hear the mellow wedding bells, Golden bells! What a world of happiness their harmony foretells Through the balmy air of night How they ring out their delight! From the molten golden notes, And all in tune What a liquid ditty floats To the turtle-dove that listens while she gloats On the moon!
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The believer is happy. The doubter is wise.
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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.
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And so, being young and dipt in folly, I fell in love with melancholy.
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Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
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I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient.
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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.
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...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.
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The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow...
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Melancholy is ... the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.
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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.
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If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment.
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In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
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A fearful instance of the ill consequences attending upon irascibility - alive, with the qualifications of the dead - dead, with the propensities of the living - an anomaly on the face of the earth - being very calm, yet breathless.