First Year/ Edgar Allan Poe

A gentleman with a pug nose is a contradiction in terms.

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

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.


I have no faith in human perfectability. 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 never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

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.

Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.


The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

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

To be thoroughly conversant with a man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.

To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.

We loved with a love that was more than love.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.