Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

152. “There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

153. “It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain, but, once conceived, it haunted me day and night.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

154. “I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but he quenched it in misery.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

155. “It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

156. “And I fell violently on my face.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

157. “Finally on Sunday morning, October 7, 1849, “He became quiet and seemed to rest for a short time. Then, gently, moving his head,” he said, “Lord help my poor soul.” As he had lived so he died-in great misery and tragedy.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

158. “To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

159. “Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

160. “In the deepest slumber-no! In delirium-no! In a swoon-no! In death-no! even in the grave all is not lost.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

161. “Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

162. “Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

163. “The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

164. “There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

165. “From a proud tower in the town, Death looks gigantically down.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

166. “The generous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

167. “Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

168. “He is, as you say, a remarkable horse, a prodigious horse, although as you very justly observe, a suspicious and untractable character.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

169. “In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream – an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

170. “That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

171. “Nemo impune me lacessit!!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

172. “As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

173. “I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

174. “Once upon a midnight dreary.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

175. “There are surely other worlds than this – other thoughts than the thoughts of the multitude – other speculations than the speculations of the sophist. Who then shall call thy conduct into question? who blame thee for thy visionary hours, or denounce those occupations as a wasting away of life, which were but the overflowings of thine everlasting energies?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

176. “In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

177. “The usual derivation of the word Metaphysics is not to be sustainedthe science is supposed to take its name from its superiority to physics. The truth is, that Aristotle’s treatise on Morals is next in succession to his Book of Physics.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

178. “One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

179. “But tomorrow I die, and today I would unburden my soul.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

180. “We gave him a hearty welcome, for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man...”

— Edgar Allan Poe

181. “Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin; Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

182. “Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed! – tear up the planks! – here, here! – it is the beating of his hideous heart!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

183. “Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!” Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

184. “Many years ago, I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand. He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been wealthy; but a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

185. “Here I opened wide the door; – Darkness there, and nothing more.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

186. “In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

187. “It all depends on the robber’s knowledge of the loser’s knowledge of the robber. – Daupin.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

188. “I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, “a long poem,” is simply a flat contradiction in terms.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

189. “There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart – an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

190. “Democracy is a very admirable form of government – for dogs.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

191. “Scorching my seared heart with a pain, not hell shall make me fear again.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

192. “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.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

193. “Other friends have flown before – On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

194. “To him, who still would gaze upon the glory of the summer sun, there comes, when that sun will from him part, a sullen hopelessness of heart.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

195. “Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded...”

— Edgar Allan Poe

196. “Immensely tall trunks of trees, gray and leafless, rose up in endless succession as far as the eye could reach. Their roots were concealed in wide-spreading morasses, whose dreary water lay intensely black, still, and altogether terrible, beneath. And the strange trees seemed endowed with a human vitality, and waving to and fro their skeleton arms, were crying to the silent waters for mercy, in the shrill and piercing accents of the most acute agony and despair.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

197. “There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

198. “At midnight, in the month of June, I stand beneath the mystic moon.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

199. “Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

200. “The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.”

— Edgar Allan Poe