Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

355. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

366. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

368. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

370. “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

371. “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

372. “Darkness there, and nothing more.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

386. “The wine sparkled in his eyes.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

388. “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

389. “Be nothing which thou art not.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

391. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

394. “The giant will succumbed to a power more stern.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

395. “And the riven quote, nevermore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

396. “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

397. “Horrors of a nature most stern and most appalling would too frequently obtrude themselves upon my mind, and shake the innermost depths of my soul with the bare supposition of their possibility.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

398. “And his brow was lofty with thought, and his eye wild with care; and, in the few furrows upon his cheek I read the fables of sorrow, and weariness, and disgust with mankind, and a longing after solitude.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

399. “There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

400. “Some human memories and tearful lore, Render him terrorless: his name’s “No More.”

— Edgar Allan Poe