* Unfaithful Giant Born This Day: Edgar Allan Poe ~ Agnostic ~ January 19, 1809

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

From Edgar Allan Poe quotes (American short-story Writer, Editor, Poet and Critic, 1809-1849) ThinkExist

Let us begin, then, at once, with that merest of words, 'Infinity.' This, like 'God,' 'spirit,' and some other expressions of which the equivalents exist in all languages, is by no means the expression of an idea--but of an effort at one. It stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.

~ Edgar Allan Poe, from Eureka 1848

The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.

~ Edgar Allan Poe, from Ira D Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion, quoted from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter ... than you and I; and all religion ... is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.

~ Edgar Allan Poe, from Rufus K Noyes, Views of Religion, quoted from James A. Haught, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Photo ~ Wikipedia

A Dream

In visions of the dark night
I have dreamed of joy departed-
But a waking dream of life and light
Hath left me broken-hearted.

Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?

That holy dream- that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me as a lovely beam
A lonely spirit guiding.

What though that light, thro' storm and night,
So trembled from afar-
What could there be more purely bright
In Truth's day-star?

Among his masterpieces are the short stories The Pit and the Pendulum, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Masque of the Red Death, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Gold Bug.

Once upon a midnight dreary ..., The Raven, 1845

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