-
The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age, since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information by throwing in the reader's way piles of lumber in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful matter, peradventure interspersed.
-
Grammar is the analysis of language.
-
Years of love have been forgotIn the hatred of a minute.
-
I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind.
-
Thou wast that all to me, love, For which my soul did pine - A green isle in the sea, love,A fountain and a shrine,All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,And all the flowers were mine.
-
Thank Heaven! the crisis -The danger is past,And the lingering illnessIs over at last -And the fever called 'Living'Is conquered at last.
-
Thou wouldst be loved? - then let thy heartFrom 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.
-
Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.
-
I seemed to be upon the verge of comprehension, without the power to comprehend as men, at time, find themselves upon the brink of rememberance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
-
As for Republicanism, no analogy could be found for it upon the face of the earth—unless we except the case of the "prairie dogs," an exception which seems to demonstrate, if anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government—for dogs.
-
And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
-
By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.
-
I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.
-
There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.
-
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.
-
'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.'
-
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor. "Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee-- Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!" Quothe the Raven, "Nevermore.
-
The skies they were ashen and sober;The leaves they were crisped and sere - The leaves they were withering and sere;It was night in the lonesome OctoberOf my most immemorial year.
-
If I venture to displace ... the microscopical speck of dust... on the point of my finger,... I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of multitudinous myriads of stars.
-
I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
-
'Prophet!' said I, 'thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!'
-
There are two bodies - the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call "death," is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.
-
The most natural, and, consequently, the truest and most intense of the human affections are those which arise in the heart as if by electric sympathy.
-
Alas! for that accursed time They bore thee o'er the billow, From love to titled age and crime, And an unholy pillow! From me, and from our misty clime, Where weeps the silver willow!