Invisible things are the only realities.

The line expresses a characteristically Poe-like reversal of common sense: what cannot be seen—ideas, emotions, memory, conscience, the soul, the afterlife—may be more enduring and consequential than the material world. Read this way, “invisible things” are the forces that govern human experience and motivate action, while visible objects are transient surfaces. The aphorism also aligns with Romantic and Gothic preoccupations with the uncanny and the metaphysical, suggesting that reality is not exhausted by empirical observation. Without a verified textual setting, however, the statement should be treated as a thematic summary of Poe’s sensibility rather than securely tied to a particular moment or argument he made.