Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear. - Edgar Allan Poe

"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."

"I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom."

"The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true."

"There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion."

"The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world."