- "All that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream."
- "Science has not yet taught us if madness is or not the sublimity of the intelligence."
- "It is a happiness to wonder, it is a happiness to dream."
- "The customs of the world are so many conventional follies."
- "I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
- "Melancholy is..the most legitimate of all poetical tones."
- "Years of love have been forgotten, in the hatred of a minute."
- "I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched."
- "You call it hope. It is but agony of desire."
- "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?"
- "I have great faith in fools - self-confidence, my friends will call it."
- "Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man."
- "I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind."
- "I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty."
- "All religions, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination and poetry."
- "I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but he quenched it in misery."
- "But as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which have been."
- "Convinced myself, I seek not to convince."
- "Invisible things are the only realities."
- "Stupidity is a talent for misconception."
- "And so being young and dipped in folly, I fell in love with melancholy."
- "In the heaven's above, the angels, whispering to one another, can find, among their burning terms of love, none so devotional as that of "Mother". "
- "I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow."
- "Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest."
- "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."
- "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."
- "I saw no heaven, but in her eyes."
- "That the play is the tragedy, "Man", and its hero, the Conqueror Worm."
- "I smiled, for what had I to fear?"
- "Ha! ha! ha!...ha! ha! ha!...ho! ho! ho!
- Edgar Allan Poe,
American writer, poet and editor