Top 500 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen ME.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

403. “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

404. “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

405. “Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it the Reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the mist.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

406. “It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea...”

— Edgar Allan Poe

407. “Just as the Intellect concerns itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with displaying the charms: – waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity – her disproportion – her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious – in a word, to Beauty.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

409. “If Pierre Bon-Bon had his failings – and what great man has not a thousand? – if Pierre Bon-Bon, I say, had his failings, they were failings of very little importance – faults indeed which, in other tempers, have often been looked upon rather in the light of virtues.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

410. “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

411. “Ha! ha! ha! – ha! ha! ha! – ho! ho! ho!”

— Edgar Allan Poe

412. “I believe, indeed, that what I could not refrain from saying to him on this head had the effect of inducing him to push on. While, therefore, I cannot but lament the most unfortunate and bloody events which immediately arose from my advice, I must still be allowed to feel some degree of gratification at having been instrumental, however remotely, in opening to the eye of science one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed its attention.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

413. “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

414. “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

415. “In his opinion the powers of the intellect held intimate connection with the capabilities of the stomach.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

416. “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens...”

— Edgar Allan Poe

417. “There was not a sous-cusinier in Rouen, who could not have told you that Bon-Bon was a man of genius. His very cat knew it, and forebore to whisk her tail in the presence of the man of genius.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

419. “A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid and very luminous... finely molded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

420. “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

421. “This accident, with the loss of my insurance, and with the more serious loss of my hair, – the whole of which had been singed off by fire, – predisposed me to serious impressions, so that, finally, I made up my mind to take a wife.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

422. “The convex surface of any segment of a sphere is, to the entire surface of the sphere itself, as the versed sine of the segment to the diameter of the sphere.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “There is no exquisite beauty,” says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, “without some strangeness in the proportion.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

428. “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

429. “We grew in age – and love – together Roaming the forest, and the wild; My breast her shield in wintry weather – And, when the friendly sunshine smil’d, And she would mark the opening skies, I saw no Heaven – but in her eyes.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

430. “I wish the composure but not the depression of solitude.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

431. “The moon’s distance from the earth is, in round numbers, 240,000 miles.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

432. “An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus plainly a sense of the Beautiful.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

433. “Wyatt’s two sisters I knew very well, and most amiable and clever girls they were. His wife he had newly married, and I had never yet seen her. He had often talked about her in my presence, however, and in his usual style of enthusiasm. He described her as of surpassing beauty, wit, and accomplishment. I was, therefore, quite anxious to make her acquaintance.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

434. “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

435. “The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

436. “And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

437. “He had the ordinary temperament of genius, and was a compound of misanthropy, sensibility, and enthusiasm.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

438. “The summit of the cataract was utterly lost in the dimness and the distance. Yet we were evidently approaching it with a hideous velocity. At intervals there were visible in it wide, yawning, but momentary rents, and from out these rents, within which was a chaos of flitting and indistinct images, there came rushing and mighty, but soundless wings, tearing up the enkindled ocean in their course.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

439. “He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower – is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

440. “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

441. “She came and departed as a shadow.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

442. “Our first meeting was at an obscure library in the Rue Montmartre, where the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume, brought us into closer communion.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

443. “Death by the visitation of God.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

444. “Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

445. “I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

446. “Is it sympathy for the sheep you wish to excite? I love a sheep from the bottom of my heart...”

— Edgar Allan Poe

447. “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

448. “Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore –.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

449. “Eager vehemence of desire for life.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

450. “One night as I sat, half stupefied, in a den of more than infamy, my attention.”

— Edgar Allan Poe