Words matter. These are the best Edgar Allan Poe Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have no faith in human perfectability. 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.
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.
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.
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.
The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.
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.
The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
Lord, help my poor soul.
To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
We loved with a love that was more than love.
A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.
Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.
Stupidity is a talent for misconception.
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
The generous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.
In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.
