Quote

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

Edgar Allan Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe
Age: 40 †
Born: 1809
Born: January 19
Died: 1849
Died: October 7
Author
Crime Writer
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Theorist
Lyricist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Poe
Edgar Poe
E. A. Poe
Usually
Genius
Silence
Saying
Shudders
Language
Incompleteness
True
Prefers
Everything
Thoughtful
Something
Communication

More quotes by Edgar Allan Poe

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It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.
Edgar Allan Poe
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To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
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A mystery, and a dream, should my early life seem.
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In the marginalia ... we talk only to ourselves we therefore talk freshly - boldly - originally - with abandonment - without conceit.
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Deep in earth my love is lying And I must weep alone.
Edgar Allan Poe
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...And, all at once, the moon arouse through the thin ghastly mist, And was crimson in color... And they lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out therefrom. And lay down at the feet of the demon. And looked at him steadily in the face.
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The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.
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Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly, I wished the morrow - vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Leonore - For the rare and radiant maiden who the angels name Lenore - Nameless here for evermore.
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You are not wrong who deem That my days have been a dream Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe
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A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.
Edgar Allan Poe
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The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.
Edgar Allan Poe
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I have great faith in fools,— self-confidence my friends will call it.
Edgar Allan Poe
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The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.
Edgar Allan Poe
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There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge.
Edgar Allan Poe
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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.
Edgar Allan Poe
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How much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the most appalling spectacles of inanimate matter.
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In me didst thou exist-and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.
Edgar Allan Poe
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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.
Edgar Allan Poe
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But our love was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we Of many far wiser than we And neither the angels in heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
Edgar Allan Poe
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A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.
Edgar Allan Poe