Quote

It is the curse of a certain order of mind, that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing.Still less is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done.

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
Thing
Shows
Curse
Mind
Order
Content
Never
Stills
Satisfied
Certain
Consciousness
Still
Rest
Reason
Ability
Done
Less
Must
Show

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The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
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Sound loves to revel in a summer night.
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As a viewed myself in a fragment of looking-glass..., I was so impressed with a sense of vague awe at my appearance ... that I was seized with a violent tremour.
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The world is a great ocean, upon which we encounter more tempestuous storms than calms.
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All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
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There might be a class of beings, human once, but now to humanity invisible, for whose scrutiny, and for whose refined appreciation of the beautiful, more especially than for our own, had been set in order by God the great landscape-garden of the whole earth.
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I have great faith in fools,— self-confidence my friends will call it.
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I might refer at once, if necessary, to a hundred well authenticated instances. One of very remarkable character, and of which the circumstances may be fresh in the memory of some of my readers, occurred, not very long ago, in the neighboring city of Baltimore, where it occasioned a painful, intense, and widely extended excitement.
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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.
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Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.
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And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy dark eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams-- In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams!
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...If you do not take it up with you in some way, I shall be under the necessity of breaking your head with this shovel
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In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found.
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Grammar is the analysis of language.
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The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow
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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.
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But in the expression of the countenance, which was beaming all over with smiles, there still lurked (incomprehensible anomalyl) that fitful strain of melancholy which will ever be found inseparable from the perfection of the beautiful.
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Prophet! said I, thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! By that Heaven that bends above us- by that God we both adore- Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore- Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore. Quoth the Raven, Nevermor
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There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage , and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind.
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It would be mockery to call such dreariness heaven at all.
Edgar Allan Poe