787 Quotes by Edgar Allan Poe

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes — die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.

I have before suggested that a genuine blackguard is never without a pocket-handkerchief.

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.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.

In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.

If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being?

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded...

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.