Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

254. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

258. “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

259. “And then there are times, Mr. Osgood, when one must just let go.” His gaze softened. “I believe,” he said after a moment, “that those are the happiest of times.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

260. “A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

261. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

267. “Here the vast bed of waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion-heaving, boiling, hissing-gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

268. “With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

270. “In for ever knowing, we are for ever blessed; but to know all were the curse of a fiend.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

271. “Luchesi cannot tell amontillado from a sherry.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

272. “A gentleman with a pug nose is a contradiction in terms.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

273. “Nemo impune me lacessit!!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

274. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

276. “The result of law inviolate is perfection–right–negative happiness. The result of law violate is imperfection, wrong, positive pain.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

277. “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

278. “There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

279. “The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

280. “Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door,- Perched, and sat, and nothing more.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

281. “A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

282. “Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his health.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

283. “The days have never been when thou couldst love me – but her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

284. “The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, – not the material of my every-day existence – but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

285. “And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not... through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and raptorous joys of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

286. “To see distinctly the machinery – the wheels and pinions – of any work of Art is, unquestionably, of itself, a pleasure, but one which we are able to enjoy only just in proportion as we do not enjoy the legitimate effect designed by the artist.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

287. “The memory of a past happiness is the anguish of today.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

288. “A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

289. “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

290. “The secret of a poem, no less than a jest’s prosperity, lies in the ear of him that hears it.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

291. “Imperceptibly the love of these discords grew upon me as my love of music grew stronger.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

292. “I am one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

293. “The people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

294. “I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

295. “With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

296. “I have before suggested that a genuine blackguard is never without a pocket-handkerchief.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

297. “To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

298. “He impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but in so doing he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole. Thus there is such a thing as being too profound. 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

299. “I am dying, yet shall I live.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

300. “To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death.”

— Edgar Allan Poe