"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" Quotes

The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis.

The senses sometimes declare war on the reason; and the secret to success lies in the skillful reconciliation of these two hostile forces.

The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.

In the meantime I could not help making anticipations. The corpse of the daughter would show that she had been murdered. Then the body of the old lady would be accounted for. How? I could not imagine.

The powers of the man are not superseded by his own, but by those of his fellow-men.

I felt a creeping of the flesh as Dupin asked me the question. I felt that I was getting pale, and wished him gone.

The history of human knowledge has so uninterruptedly shown that to collateral, or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and most valuable discoveries, that it has at length become necessary, in any prospective view of improvement, to make not only large, but the largest allowances for inventions that shall arise by chance.

The first intelligence received by the police was of the murder of the daughter, followed closely by the disappearance of the body of the mother.

The higher intellect, the imagination, the spirit, and even the heart might all find their congenial aliment in pursuits which, as some of the yet unallied and unorganised provinces of the kingdom of mind, partook neither of the nature of the mental nor the material.

They have no variation of principle in their investigations; at best, when urged by some unusual emergency—by some extraordinary reward—they extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, without touching their principles.