Edgar Allan Poe

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 became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

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

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

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

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.

Invisible things are the only realities.

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.

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

From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw; I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.

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

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

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

To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!

I am a writer. Therefore, I am not sane.

It is an evil growing out of our republican institutions, that here a man of large purse has usually a very little soul which he keeps in it.