Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “It was well said of a certain German book that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen” – it does not permit itself to be read.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

202. “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

203. “I smiled, – for what had I to fear?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

204. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

206. “I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

207. “Nothing further then he uttered – not a feather then he fluttered – Till I scarcely more than muttered, “Other friends have flown before – On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.” Then the bird said, “Nevermore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

208. “The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

209. “Leave my loneliness unbroken! – quit the bust above my door!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

210. “Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

211. “And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

212. “Whether people grow fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke, I have never been quite able to determine...”

— Edgar Allan Poe

213. “Reaching out to her is like drinking from a memory.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

214. “In efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

215. “For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

216. “How often we forget all time, when lone Admiring Nature’s universal throne; Her woods – her wilds – her mountains – the intense Reply of HERS to OUR intelligence!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

217. “Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

218. “Every moment of the night Forever changing places And they put out the star-light With the breath from their pale faces.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

219. “My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

220. “What chance – what one event brought this evil thing to pass, bear with me while I relate. Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. I long, in passing through the dim valley, for the sympathy – I had nearly said for the pity – of my fellow men. I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

221. “My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

222. “True! – nervous – very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

223. “It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood. And I stood in the morass among the tall and the rain fell upon my head-and the lilies sighed one unto the other in the solemnity of their desolation.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

224. “The higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

225. “I have been happy, though in a dream. I have been happy-and I love the theme: Dreams! in their vivid colouring of life As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

226. “But Psyche uplifting her finger said: Sadly this star I mistrust.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

228. “In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

229. “It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us – but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

230. “One half of the pleasure experienced at a theatre arises from the spectator’s sympathy with the rest of the audience, and, especially from his belief in their sympathy with him.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

231. “If I could dwell where Israfel hath dwelt and he where I he might not sing so wildly well a mortal melody while a bolder note then this might swell from my lyre in the sky.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

232. “Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heartone of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

233. “Believe me, there exists no such dilemma as that in which a gentleman is placed when he is forced to reply to a blackguard.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

234. “Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

235. “By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

236. “We had always dwelled together, beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of the Many Colored Grass.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

237. “A mystery, and a dream, should my early life seem.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

238. “I went as a passenger, having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

239. “The Romans worshipped their standard; and the Roman standard happened to be an eagle. Our standard is only one tenth of an eagle, – a dollar, but we make all even by adoring it with tenfold devotion.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

240. “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

241. “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

242. “I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

243. “All in the immediate vicinity of the ship, is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

244. “How much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the most appalling spectacles of inanimate matter.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

245. “If you are ever drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

246. “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

247. “Nemo impune me lacessit!!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

248. “In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

249. “This wild star – it is now three centuries since, with clasped hands, and with streaming eyes,... I spoke it... into birth.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

250. “We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused – in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible.”

— Edgar Allan Poe