Edgar Allan Poe cytaty

strona 4

„Lecz czy wspomnienie minionej niedoli, nie jest radością chwili obecnej?”

„Wszystko, co osiągnął ludzki, tenże sam rozum musi rozwiązać.”

„Czyż życie nie jest snem, który się śni we śnie?”

„Odległość między życiem a śmiercią jest nieokreślona. Dlatego nikt nie wie, gdzie kończy się jedno, a zaczyna drugie.”

„Człowiek nie ustępowałby aniołom i nie podlegałby wcale śmierci, gdyby nie słabość wątłej jego woli.”

„Ludzie zazwyczaj nikczemnieją stopniowo. Co do mojej osoby – wszystka cnota w oka mgnieniu, znienacka opadła ze mnie, jako płaszcz.”

„Stałem ze zdumieniem w oku, sny śniąc, jakich nikt z śmiertelnych nie śmiał śnić.”

„Zawsze wierzyłem w głupców. Moi przyjaciele nazywają to wiarą w samego siebie.”

„Ci, co śnią za dnia, wiedzą o wielu rzeczach niedostępnych dla tych, co śnią tylko nocą.”

„Nie ma nic piękniejszego, niż śmierć pięknej kobiety.”

„Jeśli chcesz od razu o czymś zapomnieć, zanotuj sobie, że to trzeba pamiętać.”

„A kruk rzecze: – Nigdy już!”

„Nie jest naprawdę odważny ten, kto boi się, by inni nie pomyśleli o nim, że jest tchórzem.”

„Zwyciężyłeś i przeto ulegam. Atoli odtąd umarłeś na równi ze mną – umarłeś dla Ziemi, dla Nieba i dla Nadziei! We mnie istniałeś i – spojrzyj w moją śmierć, spojrzyj wskroś tej, która jest twoją, postaci, – jak doszczętnie zamordowałeś siebie samego!”

„Są takie bezcielesne rzeczy, są zjawiska,
Co mają byt podwójny…”

„Zazwyczaj ludzie podleją stopniowo.”

„Najtrwalsze i najpiękniejsze więzi duchowe nawiązywane bywają od pierwszego wejrzenia.”

„ja byłem dzieckiem i ona była dzieckiem,
w królestwie nad morzem,
ale kochaliśmy miłością, która była czymś więcej niż miłością —
Ja i moja Annabel Lee —”

“In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace —
Radiant palace — reared its head.”

“Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul —
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.”

“"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! — tear up the planks! — here, here! — it is the beating of his hideous heart!"”

“The best things in life make you sweaty”

“I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence.”

“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!”

“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.”

“And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams —
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.”

“Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?”

“If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize at one effort the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own — the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple — a few plain words — "My Heart Laid Bare."”

“For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not — and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.”

“Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied, —
"If you seek for Eldorado!”

“Can it be fancied that Deity ever vindictively
Made in his image a mannikin merely to madden it?”

“But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we —
Of many far wiser than we —
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee”

“Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen —; although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature.”

“The happiest day — the happiest hour
My sear'd and blighted heart hath known,
The highest hope of pride and power,
I feel hath flown.”

“Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates — the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.”

“It is with literature as with law or empire — an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.”

“O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?”

“"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore.”

“There is no oath which seems to me so sacred as that sworn by the all-divine love I bear you. — By this love, then, and by the God who reigns in Heaven, I swear to you that my soul is incapable of dishonor — that, with the exception of occasional follies and excesses which I bitterly lament, but to which I have been driven by intolerable sorrow, and which are hourly committed by others without attracting any notice whatever — I can call to mind no act of my life which would bring a blush to my cheek — or to yours. If I have erred at all, in this regard, it has been on the side of what the world would call a Quixotic sense of the honorable — of the chivalrous.”

“And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

“The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose.”

“And all I loved, I loved alone. ”

“I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind.”

“A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.”

“You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

“Thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist—it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution. His mask and cloak lay, where he had thrown them, upon the floor. Not a thread in all his raiment—not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own!”

“A large mirror,—so at first it seemed to me in my confusion—now stood where none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait.”