Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

265. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

268. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

276. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

278. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

297. “Quoth the raven “Nevermore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

298. “Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it the Reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the mist.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

300. “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