Edgar Allan Poe: Trending quotes (page 5)

“If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Tell-Tale Heart

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

Thinking , Silence , Madness , Night

“After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.”

Edgar Allan Poe

Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)

God , Soul , Thinking , Reading

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

Edgar Allan Poe

Sometimes quoted as "All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination and poetry"
According to John A. Joyce's much-criticized biography Edgar Allen Poe (1901), this was said by Poe to William Barton.
Disputed
Source: Google Books link https://books.google.com/books?id=_cdEAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=John+Alexander+Joyce+poe&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAGoVChMIsuLtsoXUyAIVVSqICh2cqAI_#v=onepage&q=%22chicanery%2C%20fear%22&f=false

Fear , Religion , Imagination

“These fellows, knowing the extravagant gullibility of the age, set their wits to work in the imagination of improbable possibilities — of odd accidents, as they term them; but to a reflecting intellect (like mine," I added, in parenthesis, putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my nose,) "to a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it seems evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these 'odd accidents' is by far the oddest accident of all. For my own part, I intend to believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the 'singular' about it.”

Edgar Allan Poe

"The Angel Of The Odd: An Extravaganza".

Age , Imagination , Understanding , Parting

“How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings!”

Edgar Allan Poe

Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)

Books , Suffering

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Premature Burial

"The Premature Burial" (1844).

Life , Death

“TRUE! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Tell-Tale Heart

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

Madness

“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.”

Edgar Allan Poe

"Letter to Mr. B — ".

Pleasure , Music , Idea

“Come! let the burial rite be read — the funeral song be sung! —
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young —
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.”

Edgar Allan Poe Lenore

"Lenore", st. 1 (1831).

Reading , Dead

“A dark unfathom'd tide
Of interminable pride —
A mystery, and a dream,
Should my early life seem.”

Edgar Allan Poe book Tamerlane and Other Poems

" Imitation http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/poe/17481", Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827).

Life , Dreams

“And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.”

Edgar Allan Poe The City in the Sea

St. 5.
The City in the Sea (1831)

Hell

“Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore —
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!”

Edgar Allan Poe The Raven

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
Stanza 8.
The Raven (1844)

Night

“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”

Edgar Allan Poe

" Eleonora http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/sid.6/bookid.9/" (1841).

Deep , Good Night , Dreams , Night

“To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Murders in the Rue Morgue

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841).

“Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture — a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Tell-Tale Heart

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

Love , Life , Thinking , Passion

“I attacked with great resolution the editorial matter, and, reading it from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read it from the end to the beginning, but with no more satisfactory result.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Angel of the Odd

"The Angel of the Odd" (1850).

Understanding , Reading

“In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.”

Edgar Allan Poe

Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)

Books , Reading

“There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind.”

Edgar Allan Poe

Poe stating his arguments that Maelzel's Chess-Player was a hoax. Maelzel's Chess-Player http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/maelzel.htm, Southern Literary Journal (April 1836).

“And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.”

Edgar Allan Poe The Raven

Stanza 18.
The Raven (1844)

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term "Art," I should call it "the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul." The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of "Artist".”

Edgar Allan Poe

Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)

Art , Soul , Nature , Sense