Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “She came and departed as a shadow.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

452. “Ugh! ugh! ugh! – ugh! ugh! ugh! – ugh! ugh! ugh! – ugh! ugh! ugh! – ugh! ugh! ugh!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

453. “The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

454. “It might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier, or later, for I had taken no note of time, when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct, startled me from my revery. – I felt that it came from the bed of ebony – the bed of death. I listened in an agony of superstitious terror – but there was no repetition of the sound. I strained my vision to detect any motion in the corpse – but there was not the slightest perceptible.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

455. “And spite of all dogmas, current in all ages, One settled fact is better than ten sages.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

456. “Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

457. “But my disease grew upon me – for what disease is like Alcohol!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

458. “I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

459. “So I am mad, you say? You should have seen how careful I was to put the body where no one could find it. First I cut off the head, then the arms and the legs. I was careful not to let a single drop of blood fall on the floor. I pulled up three of the boards that formed the floor, and put the pieces of the body there. Then I put the boards down again, care fully, so carefully that no human eye could see that they had been moved.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

460. “How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? – from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

461. “Man could not both know and succumb. Meantime huge smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

462. “Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore –.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

463. “Eager vehemence of desire for life.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

464. “He is cool- cool as a cucumber.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

465. “Yet what business had I with hope?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

466. “In truth, the man who would behold aright the glory of God upon earth must in solitude behold that glory.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

467. “Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

468. “I never knew any one so keenly alive to a joke as the king was.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

469. “For the love of God, Montresor!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

470. “It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

471. “So violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

472. “But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

473. “When given bad news, most women of my station can afford to slump onto their divans, their china cups slipping from their fingers to the carpet, their hair falling prettily from its pins, their fourteen starched petticoats compacting with a plush crunch. I am not one of them.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

474. “I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself... and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

475. “I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my own individual life, in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God’s power.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

476. “Let me call myself, for the present, Willam Wilson.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

477. “And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

478. “But my disease grew upon me – for what disease is like Alcohol! – and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old, and consequently somewhat peevish – even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

479. “What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones – that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

480. “Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

481. “There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

482. “I well, too well, understood that to think, in my situation, was to be lost.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

483. “John Greely was the eldest and stoutest of the five, and had the reputation of being the strongest man, as well as best shot in Kentucky – – from which State they all came.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

484. “Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

485. “Then we sallied forth into the streets arm in arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

486. “This apartment, which you no doubt profanely suppose to be the shop of Will Wimble the undertaker – a man whom we know not, and whose plebeian appellation has never before this night thwarted our royal ears – this apartment, I say, is the Dais-Chamber of our Palace, devoted to the councils of our kingdom, and to other sacred and lofty purposes.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

487. “As for Progress it was at one time quite a nuisance, but it never progressed.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

488. “Such weakness can scarcely be conceived, and to those who have never been similarly situated will, no doubt, appear unnatural;.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

489. “Who does not remember that, at such a time as this, the eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its sorrow, and sees in innumerable far-off places, the wo which is close at hand?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

490. “And all I lov’d – I lov’d alone.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

491. “I am come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether much that is glorious – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

492. “I short I became a new man, and lived a man’s life. From that memorable night, I dismissed forever my apprehensions, and with them vanished the cataleptic disorder, of which, perhaps, they had been less the consequence than the cause.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

493. “Now, then, did my spirit fully and freely burn with more than all the fires of her own.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

494. “Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities – that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

495. “I dare say you have often observed this disposition to temporize, or to procrastinate, in people who are labouring under any very poignant sorrow. Their powers of mind seem to be rendered torpid, so that they have a horror of any thing like action, and like nothing in the world so well as to liequietly in bed and “nurse their grief,” as the old ladies express it- that is to say, ruminate over the trouble.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

496. “Si no hay junto a nosotros un brazo amigo que nos detenga, o somos incapaces de alejarnos, nos arrojamos, nos aniquilamos en el abismo.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

497. “That man, as a race, should not become extinct, I saw that he must be born again.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

498. “MISERY is manifold.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

499. “Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

500. “Nor is it any argument against bulk being an object with God, that space itself is infinite; for there may be an infinity of matter to fill it.”

— Edgar Allan Poe