Edgar Allan Poe
“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
Edgar Allan Poe, “Eleonora” (1842)
Documented source
Attribution
Edgar Allan Poe
Source
Edgar Allan Poe, “Eleonora” (1842)
In full
“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
Status
Public domain in the United States
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About this line
Poe opens “Eleonora” by putting his narrator on trial. The man confesses to “dubious sanity” — then immediately turns the charge around. He argues that madness and genius share the same border, that the mind which tips toward one also touches the other, and that what looks like derangement from the outside is sometimes the only instrument fine enough to catch what the rational mind misses entirely. It is a defense brief, written in the opening paragraph of a ghost story. Poe files it without apology.
Why we carry this line
Are you a daydreamer? I am. It was the most positive spin I’d heard on the subject. And that’s why we carry this quote. For all the daydreamers out there.
Objects carrying this line
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All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
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And all I lovd—I lovd alone—
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There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.
Francis Bacon · Essays, 1625 — quoted by Poe in “Ligeia”
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