Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

352. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

354. “We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink away from the danger. Unaccountably we remain... it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height... for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

355. “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

356. “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

357. “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for the raven nevermore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

358. “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

359. “A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

360. “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

361. “Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

362. “No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human loveliness, do more than approach the living and breathing human beauty as it gladdens our daily path.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

363. “Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

364. “Quand un bon vin meuble mon estomac Je suis plus savant que Balzac – Plus sage que Pibrac; Mon brass seul faisant l’attaque De la nation Coseaque, La mettroit au sac; De Charon je passerois le lac En dormant dans son bac, J’irois au fier Eac, Sans que mon coeur fit tic ni tac, Premmer du tabac. – French Vaudeville.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

365. “In no affairs of mere prejudice, pro or con, do we deduce inferences with entire certainty, even from the most simple data.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

366. “Actually, I do have doubts, all the time. Any thinking person does. There are so many sides to every question.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

367. “I saw no heaven – but in her eyes.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

368. “But we loved with a love that was more than love, I and my Annabel Lee.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

369. “A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

370. “The winters in the latitude of Sullivan’s Island are seldom very severe, and in the fall of the year it is a rare event indeed.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

371. “Long suffering had nearly annihilated all my ordinary powers of mind. I was an imbecile – an idiot.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

372. “I kneel, an altered and an humble man, Amid thy shadows, and so drink within My very soul thy grandeur, gloom, and glory!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

373. “Intensos rigidam in frontem ascendere canos Passus erat.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

374. “TRUE! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

375. “Darkness there, and nothing more.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

376. “Science has its place in man’s search for understanding, but science and the imagination have tended to bifurcate in the modern world; only the true poetic intellect can end this long-established dualism.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

377. “While I was busied in reflection, my eyes fell upon a narrow ledge in the eastern face of the rock, perhaps a yard below the summit upon which I stood. This ledge projected about eighteen inches, and was not more than a foot wide, while a niche in the cliff just above it, gave it a rude resemblance to one of the hollow-backed chairs used by our ancestors. I made no doubt that here was the ‘devil’s seat’ alluded to in the MS., and now I seemed to grasp the full secret of the riddle.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

378. “I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

379. “Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells – From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

380. “There may be a class of beings, human once, but now invisible to humanity, to whom, from afar, our disorder may seem order – our unpicturesqueness picturesque, in a word, the earth-angels, for whose scrutiny more especially than our own, and for whose death – refined appreciation of the beautiful, may have been set in array by God the wide landscape-gardens of the hemispheres.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

381. “In a night such as is this to me, a man lives-lives a whole century of life-nor would I forgo this rapturous delight for that of a whole century of ordinary existence.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

382. “At times we gasped for breath at an elevation beyond the albatross – at times became dizzy with the velocity of our descent into some watery hell, where the air grew stagnant, and no sound disturbed the slumbers of the kraken.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

383. “For many miles on either side of the river’s oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude, and stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks, and nod to and fro their everlasting heads.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

384. “From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were; I have not seen As others saw.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

385. “And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense? – now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

386. “Sit in a theatre, to see a play of hopes and fears, while the orchestra breathes fitfully the music of the spheres.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

387. “Not altogether a fool,” said G., “but then he’s a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

388. “Endeavor, Bon-Bon, to use them well; – my vision is the soul.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

389. “He did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

390. “I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief – oh, no! – it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

391. “The wine sparkled in his eyes.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

392. “Prophet!′ said I, ’thing of evil! – prophet still, it bird or devil!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

393. “The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

394. “Be nothing which thou art not.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

395. “There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

396. “We will say, then, that I am mad. I grant, at least, that there are two distinct conditions of my mental existence – the condition of a lucid reason, not to be disputed, and belonging to the memory of events forming the first epoch of my life – and.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

397. “There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

398. “A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

399. “Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

400. “At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18–, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in the company with my friend, C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisieme, No. 33 Rue Dunot, Faubourg St. Germain.”

— Edgar Allan Poe