Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

308. “I am dying, yet shall I live.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “So I am mad, you say? You should have seen how careful I was to put the body where no one could find it. First I cut off the head, then the arms and the legs. I was careful not to let a single drop of blood fall on the floor. I pulled up three of the boards that formed the floor, and put the pieces of the body there. Then I put the boards down again, care fully, so carefully that no human eye could see that they had been moved.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

320. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

328. “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

329. “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

330. “Here, at last, he is happy.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

336. “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

337. “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

338. “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

339. “Never – nevermore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

341. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

345. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

347. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

349. “Men usually grow base by degrees.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

350. “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