100 Quotes by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe, a master of Gothic and macabre literature, left an indelible mark on American literature with his captivating and haunting tales.
Poe's works, including "The Raven," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Fall of the House of Usher," explored the darker recesses of the human psyche, often delving into themes of death, madness, and the uncanny. His poetic language, characterized by its rich imagery and musicality, created an atmosphere that drew readers into the eerie worlds he crafted.
Despite his literary prowess, Poe struggled with personal hardships throughout his life, facing financial difficulties and battling inner demons. His works continue to captivate readers and inspire subsequent generations of writers, as his ability to tap into primal fears and emotions transcends time, reminding us of the complexity of the human experience.
Edgar Allan Poe Quotes
Lord help my poor soul. (Meaning)
Blood was its Avatar and its seal. (Quote Meaning)
Yes," I said, "for the love of God! (Meaning)
All works of art should begin... at the end. (Quote Meaning)
I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. (Meaning)
The fever called "living" Is conquer'd at last. (Quote Meaning)
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young. (Meaning)
I have no words alas! to tell the loveliness of loving well (Quote Meaning)
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. (Meaning)
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream. (Quote Meaning)
To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths! (Meaning)
Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see. (Quote Meaning)
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? (Meaning)
There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion. (Quote Meaning)
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing. (Meaning)
From childhood's hour I have not been as others were. (Quote Meaning)
We loved with a love that was more than love. (Meaning)
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted -- Nevermore! (Quote Meaning)
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. (Meaning)
I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind. (Quote Meaning)
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion. (Meaning)
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality. (Quote Meaning)
It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream. (Meaning)
Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so. (Quote Meaning)
The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be. (Meaning)
And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy. (Quote Meaning)
There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. (Meaning)
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. (Quote Meaning)
The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls. (Meaning)
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful. (Quote Meaning)
In the Heaven's above, the angels, whispering to one another, can find, among their burning terms of love, none so devotional as that of 'Mother'. (Meaning)
There is no beauty without some strangeness (Quote Meaning)
All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.
The believer is happy. The doubter is wise. (Meaning)
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute. (Meaning)
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Always keep a big bottle of booze at your side. If a bird starts talking nonsense to you in the middle of the night pour yourself a stiff drink.
I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.
A lie travels round the world while truth is putting her boots on.
The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.
The world is a great ocean, upon which we encounter more tempestuous storms than calms.
Leave my loneliness unbroken (Quote Meaning)
The best things in life make you sweaty. (Meaning)
If a poem hasn't ripped apart your soul; you haven't experienced poetry.
If a man deceives me once, shame on him; if he deceives me twice, shame on me.
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
Those who gossip with you will gossip about you. (Quote Meaning)
Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.
It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood.
The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow
I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy.
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
Invisible things are the only realities. (Meaning)
If you run out of ideas follow the road; you'll get there (Meaning)
I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.
The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.
I have great faith in fools,— self-confidence my friends will call it.
Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed. (Quote Meaning)
It is a happiness to wonder; -- it is a happiness to dream.
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.
Reality is the #1 cause of insanity among those who are in contact with it
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.
If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
A wise man hears one word and understands two. (Meaning)
Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.
False hope is nicer than no hope at all. (Quote Meaning)
Every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points tend to the development of the intention.
The past is a pebble in my shoe. (Meaning)
Stupidity is a talent for misconception. (Quote Meaning)
Once upon a midnight dreary (Meaning)
We gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.
And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.
The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.
The agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.
The most natural, and, consequently, the truest and most intense of the human affections are those which arise in the heart as if by electric sympathy.
Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.
To observe attentively is to remember distinctly. (Meaning)
You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about money-finders.
In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found.
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore. (Quote Meaning)
Life is for the strong, to be lived by the strong and if need be, taken by the strong. The weak were put on earth to give the strong pleasure.
Art is to look at not to criticize. (Meaning)
I am walking like a bewitched corpse, with the certainty of being eaten by the infinite, of being annulled by the only existing Absurd.
Who cares how time advances? I am drinking ale today.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.
I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat. (Quote Meaning)
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
Even in the grave, all is not lost. (Meaning)
There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad humanity must assume the aspect of Hell.
In death - no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed.
There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.
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, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.
Sensations are the great things, after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations; they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.
Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.
Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them. (Quote Meaning)
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. (Meaning)
To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary. (Quote Meaning)
I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life - except in hope, which is by no means bankable.
Happiness is not to be found in knowledge, but in the acquisition of knowledge
Democracy is a very admirable form of government - for dogs
You are not wrong who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
For years your name never passed my lips, while my soul drank in, with a delirious thirst, all that was uttered in my presence respecting you.
The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
In efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.
No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter than you and I.
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you"— here I opened wide the door; — Darkness there, and nothing more.
You need not attempt to shake off or to banter off Romance. It is an evil you will never get rid of to the end of your days. It is a part of yourself of your soul. Age will only mellow it a little, and give it a holier tone.
I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the 'mountains & the woods'-the 'altars' of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.
I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down. (Meaning)
That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.
Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. (Quote Meaning)
Thank Heaven! The crisis /The danger is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last /, and the fever called ''Living'' is conquered at last.
Deep in earth my love is lying And I must weep alone. (Meaning)
The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.
The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.
To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.
That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences,) is indulged.
A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, must not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.
The sole purpose is to provide infinite springs, at which the soul may allay the eternal thirst TO KNOW which is forever unquenchable within it, since to quench it, would be to extinguish the soul's self.
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain, but, once conceived, it haunted me day and night.
When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.
Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become.
"The reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul."
All works of art should begin... at the end.
I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror.
A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.
And the Raven, never flitting, Still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas Just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming Of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamplight o'er him streaming Throws his shadow on the floor, And my soul from out that shadow, That lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted - nevermore.
I dread the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results.
In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.
Perversity is the human thirst for self-torture.
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. (Quote Meaning)
Indeed, there is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted.
Decorum -- that bug-bear which deters so many from bliss until the opportunity for bliss has forever gone by.
A mystery, and a dream, should my early life seem. (Meaning)
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.
The true genius shudders at incompleteness. (Quote Meaning)
Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.
The people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.
Melancholy is the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.
Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.
You call it hope-that fire of fire! It is but agony of desire. (Meaning)
I have not only labored solely for the benefit of others (receiving for myself a miserable pittance), but have been forced to model my thoughts at the will of men whose imbecility was evident to all but themselves
Every moment of the night Forever changing places And they put out the star-light With the breath from their pale faces
― Edgar Allan Poe Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
