Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

252. “Quoth the raven “Nevermore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

254. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

267. “Once upon a midnight dreary.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

269. “The greater amount of truth is impulsively uttered; thus the greater amount is spoken, not written.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

270. “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

271. “Alas! for that accursed time They bore thee o’er the billow, From love to titled age and crime, And an unholy pillow! From me, and from our misty clime, Where weeps the silver willow!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

273. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

275. “So resolute is the world to despise anything which carries with it an air of simplicity.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

276. “I am dying, yet shall I live.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

277. “There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

279. “A fearful instance of the ill consequences attending upon irascibility – alive, with the qualifications of the dead – dead, with the propensities of the living – an anomaly on the face of the earth – being very calm, yet breathless.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

280. “To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking forever.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

281. “The first action of my life was the taking hold of my nose with both hands. My mother saw this and called me a genius:-my father wept for joy and presented me with a treatise on Nosology. This I mastered before I was breeched.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

282. “The mountainous surges suggest the idea of innumerable dumb gigantic fiends struggling in impotent agony.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

283. “No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter than you and I.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

284. “Did there not cross your mind some thought of the physical power of words? Is not every word an impulse on the air?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

285. “These were the days when my heart was volcanic.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

286. “No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

287. “Majesty had no eyes whatsoever, but could discover no indications of their having existed at any previous period – for the space where eyes should naturally have been was, I am constrained to say, simply a dead level of flesh.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

288. “Proprieties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

289. “My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

290. “The idea of suicide flitted across my brain; but it is a trait in the perversity of human nature to reject the obvious and the ready, for the far-distant and equivocal.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

291. “If the propositions of this Discourse are tenable, the “state of progressive collapse” is precisely that state in which alone we are warranted in considering All Things.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

292. “The look on his face frightened me terribly, but at the same time I was pleased not to be alone any more.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

293. “Here, at last, he is happy.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

294. “Man could not both know and succumb. Meantime huge smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

295. “And, indeed, if ever that spirit which is entitled Romance-if ever she, the wan and the misty-winged Ashtophet of idolatrous Egypt, presided, as they tell, over marriages ill-omened, then most surely she presided over mine.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

296. “Never – nevermore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

297. “I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

298. “If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

299. “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

300. “Let me glimpse inside your velvet bones.”

— Edgar Allan Poe