Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

352. “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

353. “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

354. “The days have never been when thou couldst love me – but her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

355. “A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “I am one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

360. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

367. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

369. “But she died; and with my own hands I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed with a long and bitter laugh as I found no traces of the first in the channel where I laid the second.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

374. “I had done a deed – what was it?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

375. “It may be that those who care for poetry lost little by his death. Fluent in prose, he never wrote verse for the sake of making a poem. When a refrain of image haunted him, the lyric that resulted was the inspiration, as he himself said, of a passion, not of a purpose.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

376. “Helen, thy beauty is to me.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

377. “I would have soothed-I would have reasoned; but, in the intensity of her wild desire for life,-for life-but for life-solace and reason were the uttermost folly.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

378. “While the male is absent at sea in search of food, the female remains on duty, and it is only upon the return of her partner that she ventures abroad.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

379. “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

380. “His eye was like the eye of a vulture, the eye of one of those terrible birds that watch and wait while an animal dies, and then fall upon the dead body and pull it to pieces to eat it.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

381. “And who shall calculate the immense influence upon social life – upon arts – upon commerce – upon literature – which will be the immediate result of the great principles of electro-magnetics!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

382. “No woman could have inflicted the blows with any weapon.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

383. “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

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

385. “Ah, not in knowledge is happiness, but in the acquisition of knowledge! In for ever knowing, we are for ever blessed; but to know all were the curse of a fiend.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

386. “In 1874 I began drawing attention to the fact that unknown and unreprinted poetry by Edgar Poe was in existence.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

387. “But, for myself, the Earth’s records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

388. “You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead – dead to the world and its hopes. In me didst thou exist – and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

389. “That she loved me I should not have doubted; and I might have been easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have regained no ordinary passion. But in death only was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

390. “Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

391. “We might say that from the impious love of liberty has been born a new tyranny – the tyranny of fools – which, in its insensible ferocity, resembles the idol of Juggernaut.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

392. “Yet what business had I with hope?”

— Edgar Allan Poe

393. “Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of the shadows.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

394. “But my disease grew upon me – for what disease is like Alcohol!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

395. “I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself... and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

396. “And all I lov’d – I lov’d alone.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

397. “How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? – from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

398. “Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

399. “It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

400. “I never knew any one so keenly alive to a joke as the king was.”

— Edgar Allan Poe