Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Yes,” I said, “for the love of God!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

452. “There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

453. “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens...”

— Edgar Allan Poe

454. “Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen ME.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

455. “Ha! ha! ha! – ha! ha! ha! – ho! ho! ho!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

456. “It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea...”

— Edgar Allan Poe

457. “Just as the Intellect concerns itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with displaying the charms: – waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity – her disproportion – her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious – in a word, to Beauty.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

458. “If Pierre Bon-Bon had his failings – and what great man has not a thousand? – if Pierre Bon-Bon, I say, had his failings, they were failings of very little importance – faults indeed which, in other tempers, have often been looked upon rather in the light of virtues.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

459. “I believe, indeed, that what I could not refrain from saying to him on this head had the effect of inducing him to push on. While, therefore, I cannot but lament the most unfortunate and bloody events which immediately arose from my advice, I must still be allowed to feel some degree of gratification at having been instrumental, however remotely, in opening to the eye of science one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed its attention.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

460. “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

461. “In his opinion the powers of the intellect held intimate connection with the capabilities of the stomach.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

462. “There was not a sous-cusinier in Rouen, who could not have told you that Bon-Bon was a man of genius. His very cat knew it, and forebore to whisk her tail in the presence of the man of genius.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

463. “A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid and very luminous... finely molded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

464. “There is no exquisite beauty,” says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, “without some strangeness in the proportion.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

465. “The convex surface of any segment of a sphere is, to the entire surface of the sphere itself, as the versed sine of the segment to the diameter of the sphere.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

466. “This accident, with the loss of my insurance, and with the more serious loss of my hair, – the whole of which had been singed off by fire, – predisposed me to serious impressions, so that, finally, I made up my mind to take a wife.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

467. “We grew in age – and love – together Roaming the forest, and the wild; My breast her shield in wintry weather – And, when the friendly sunshine smil’d, And she would mark the opening skies, I saw no Heaven – but in her eyes.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

468. “The summit of the cataract was utterly lost in the dimness and the distance. Yet we were evidently approaching it with a hideous velocity. At intervals there were visible in it wide, yawning, but momentary rents, and from out these rents, within which was a chaos of flitting and indistinct images, there came rushing and mighty, but soundless wings, tearing up the enkindled ocean in their course.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

469. “One night as I sat, half stupefied, in a den of more than infamy, my attention.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

470. “Excellence, in a poem especially, may be considered in the light of an axiom, which need only be properly put, to become self-evident. It is not excellence if it require to be demonstrated its such: – and thus to point out too particularly the merits of a work of Art, is to admit that they are not merits altogether.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

471. “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

472. “He had the ordinary temperament of genius, and was a compound of misanthropy, sensibility, and enthusiasm.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

473. “I wish the composure but not the depression of solitude.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

474. “Is it sympathy for the sheep you wish to excite? I love a sheep from the bottom of my heart...”

— Edgar Allan Poe

475. “The moon’s distance from the earth is, in round numbers, 240,000 miles.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

476. “Our first meeting was at an obscure library in the Rue Montmartre, where the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume, brought us into closer communion.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

477. “He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower – is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

479. “An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus plainly a sense of the Beautiful.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

482. “And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

483. “Wyatt’s two sisters I knew very well, and most amiable and clever girls they were. His wife he had newly married, and I had never yet seen her. He had often talked about her in my presence, however, and in his usual style of enthusiasm. He described her as of surpassing beauty, wit, and accomplishment. I was, therefore, quite anxious to make her acquaintance.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

484. “Ugh! ugh! ugh! – ugh! ugh! ugh! – ugh! ugh! ugh! – ugh! ugh! ugh! – ugh! ugh! ugh!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

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. “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

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

494. “The principle being discovered by which a machine can be made to play a game of chess, an extension of the same principle would enable it to win a game – a farther extension would enable it to win all games – that is, to beat any possible game of an antagonist. A little consideration will convince any one that the difficulty of making a machine beat all games, Is not in the least degree greater, as regards the principle of the operations necessary, than that of making it beat a single game.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

496. “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

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

500. “If the author did not deliberately propose to himself a suggestive indefinitiveness of meaning with the view of bringing about a definitiveness of vague and therefore of spiritual effect- this, at least, arose from the silent analytical promptings of that poetic genius which, in its supreme development, embodies all orders of intellectual capacity.”

— Edgar Allan Poe