787 Quotes by Edgar Allan Poe

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities---that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration.

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

For centuries, no man, in verse has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original thing. The fact is that originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought and, although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.

The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.

For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique.

Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.

Even in the grave, all is not lost.

True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.

The idea of suicide flitted across my brain; but it is a trait in the perversity of human nature to reject the obvious and the ready, for the far-distant and equivocal.