Edgar Allan Poe Quotes - Page 3

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

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

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

I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down."

[Letter to J. Beauchamp Jones, August 8, 1839]

There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.

When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect - they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul - not of intellect, or of heart.

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

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.

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.

Yet mad I am not...and very surely do I not dream.

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.

Chi sogna di giorno conosce molte cose che sfuggono a chi sogna solo di notte.

Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life,
As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Of semblance with reality, which brings
To the delirious eye, more lovely things
Of Paradise and Love- and all our own!
Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.

You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about money-finders.

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not - they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.