Edgar Allan Poe

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

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?

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

I have no faith in human perfectibility. 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.

The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved from man's own moral sense.

I wish I could write as I feel.

With a grave that is not a grave, and a hell that is not a hell.

There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.

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 peace, but in the pursuit of an anodyne.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness—and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything that might be said.

To be thoroughly conversant with the living languages is a great acquisition, but to be master of the dead ones is a greater.

Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.

I am a Virginian—at least I was born in Virginia, and I have a great deal of the Old Dominion about me.

The best things in life make you sweaty.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

Were I not a great fool, I should be a greater rogue.