A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this - that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made - not to understand - but to feel - as crime.
I have great faith in fools self-confidence my friends call it.
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book — to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quai...
I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?
All that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream.
I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but he quenched it in misery.
Yet mad I am not...and very surely do I not dream.
There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes — die with despair of...
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censerSwung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.Wretch, I cried, thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent...
In efforts to soar above our nature we invariably fall below it.
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...
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give directi...
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 d...
I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was...
I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps,...
And the Raven never flitting Still is sitting still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas Just above my chamber door And his eyes have all the seeming Of a demon's that is dreaming And the lamp...
It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity o...