Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “It would be mockery to call such dreariness heaven at all.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

303. “It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge – some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

304. “Odors have an altogether peculiar force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight or the hearing.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

305. “Quoth the raven “Nevermore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

306. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

308. “The Bostonians are really, as a race, far inferior in point of anything beyond mere intellect to any other set upon the continent of North America. They are decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

309. “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

310. “Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

312. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

320. “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

321. “In spite of the air of fablethe public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

322. “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

323. “The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

324. “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

325. “Here, at last, he is happy.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

326. “As I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current; if that appellation can properly be given to a tide, which, howling and shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

327. “This story is told through the eyes of a madman. Who, like all of us, believed he was sane.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

328. “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

329. “Never – nevermore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

330. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

332. “Men have called me mad; but the question is not settled whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

333. “It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles – the creation of supernal Beauty.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

334. “When I was young and filled with folly, I fell in love with melancholy.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

335. “Tal vez sea la propia simplicidad del asunto lo que nos conduce al error.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

336. “With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

337. “On this home by Horror haunted – tell me truly, I implore – Is there – is there balm in Gilead.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

338. “When reason returned with the morning – when I had slept off the fumes of the night’s debauch – I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

339. “This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

340. “I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

341. “Men usually grow base by degrees.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

342. “There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition – for why should I not so term it? – served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

343. “And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

344. “Because it was my crime to have no one on Earth who cared for me, or loved me.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

345. “Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore. “Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore – Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!” Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

346. “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

347. “For many hours the immediate vicinity of the low framework upon which I lay had been literally swarming with rats. They were wild, bold, ravenous – their red eyes glaring upon me as if they waited but for motionless on my part to make me their prey. “To what food,” I thought, “have they been accustomed in the well?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

349. “FOR the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not – and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

350. “But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.”

— Edgar Allan Poe