Edgar Allan Poe Quotes & Sayings

From a proud tower in the town, Death looks gigantically down. — Edgar Allan Poe

The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability. — Edgar Allan Poe

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. — Edgar Allan Poe

As for Republicanism, no analogy could be found for it upon the face of the earth - unless we except the case of the "prairie dogs," an exception which seems to demonstrate, if anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government - for dogs. — Edgar Allan Poe

All works of art should begin ... at the end. — Edgar Allan Poe

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. - Morella. THE — Edgar Allan Poe

-ev'n with us the breath Of Science dims the mirror of our joy ... — Edgar Allan Poe

THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled
but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. — Edgar Allan Poe

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been. — Edgar Allan Poe

And, all at once, the moon arouse through the thin ghastly mist, And was crimson in color ... And they lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out therefrom. And lay down at the feet of the demon. And looked at him steadily in the face. — Edgar Allan Poe

If you run out of ideas follow the road; you'll get there — Edgar Allan Poe

I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. — Edgar Allan Poe

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee
by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite
respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quothe the Raven, "Nevermore. — Edgar Allan Poe

Ear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation-to make a point-than to further the cause of truth." Dupin in "The Mystery of Marie Roget — Edgar Allan Poe

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all. — Edgar Allan Poe

And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, do we the more impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed. — Edgar Allan Poe

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 — Edgar Allan Poe

The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls ... — Edgar Allan Poe

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee. — Edgar Allan Poe

Have been sufficient to establish its real character. Indeed, however — Edgar Allan Poe

Actually, I do have doubts, all the time. Any thinking person does. There are so many sides to every question. — Edgar Allan Poe

I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy. — Edgar Allan Poe

A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no words written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished because undisturbed: and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided. — Edgar Allan Poe

No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul. — Edgar Allan Poe

Mimes in the form of God on high mutter and mumble low and hither and tither fly, mere puppets they who come and go. — Edgar Allan Poe

I fell in love with melancholy — Edgar Allan Poe

By late accounts from Rotterdam, that city seems to be in a high state of philosophical excitement. Indeed, phenomena have there occurred of a nature so completely unexpected
so entirely novel
so utterly at variance with preconceived opinions
as to leave no doubt on my mind that long ere this all Europe is in an uproar, all physics in a ferment, all reason and astronomy together by the ears. — Edgar Allan Poe

There is no exquisite beauty ... without some strangeness in the proportion. — Edgar Allan Poe

The secret of a poem, no less than a jest's prosperity, lies in the ear of him that hears it. — Edgar Allan Poe

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant. — Edgar Allan Poe

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. — Edgar Allan Poe

That which you mistake for madness is but an overacuteness of the senses. — Edgar Allan Poe

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. — Edgar Allan Poe

Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life,
As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Of semblance with reality, which brings
To the delirious eye, more lovely things
Of Paradise and Love- and all our own!
Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known. — Edgar Allan Poe

All we see or seem is but a dream within a dream...," Edgar Allan Poe — Edgar Allan Poe

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul. — Edgar Allan Poe

Indeed, there is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted. — Edgar Allan Poe

And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not... through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and raptorous joys of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses. — Edgar Allan Poe

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. — Edgar Allan Poe

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

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. — Edgar Allan Poe

It is the curse of a certain order of mind, that it can never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a thing.Still less is it content with doing it. It must both know and show how it was done. — Edgar Allan Poe

Even in the grave, all is not lost. — Edgar Allan Poe

Blood was its Avatar and its seal. — Edgar Allan Poe

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion. — Edgar Allan Poe

Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die. — Edgar Allan Poe

I am actuated by an ambition which I believe to be an honourable one - the ambition of serving the great cause of truth, while endeavouring to forward the literature of the country. — Edgar Allan Poe

Majesty had no eyes whatsoever, but could discover no indications of their having existed at any previous period - for the space where eyes should naturally have been was, I am constrained to say, simply a dead level of flesh. — Edgar Allan Poe

There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm — Edgar Allan Poe

Alas! for that accursed time They bore thee o'er the billow, From love to titled age and crime, And an unholy pillow! From me, and from our misty clime, Where weeps the silver willow! — Edgar Allan Poe

Yes," I said, "for the love of God! — Edgar Allan Poe

Finally on Sunday morning, October 7, 1849, "He became quiet and seemed to rest for a short time. Then, gently, moving his head," he said, "Lord help my poor soul." As he had lived so he died-in great misery and tragedy. — Edgar Allan Poe

The question is of will, and not, as the insanity of logic has assumed, of power. It is not that the Deity cannot modify his laws, but that we insult him in imagining a possible necessity for modification. — Edgar Allan Poe

There are two bodies - the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call "death," is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design — Edgar Allan Poe

That fitful strain of melancholy which will ever be found inseperable from the perfection of the beautiful. — Edgar Allan Poe

But the memory of past sorrow
is it not present joy? — Edgar Allan Poe

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality. — Edgar Allan Poe

Reality is the #1 cause of insanity among those who are in contact with it — Edgar Allan Poe

How often we forget all time, when lone Admiring Nature's universal throne; Her woods - her wilds - her mountains - the intense Reply of HERS to OUR intelligence! — Edgar Allan Poe

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic. — Edgar Allan Poe

we soon began to feel the effects of liberty and long speeches, and radicalism, and all that sort of thing. — Edgar Allan Poe

He who pleases is of more importance to his fellow man than he who instructs. — Edgar Allan Poe

The people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them. — Edgar Allan Poe

Even for those to whom life and death are equal jests. There are some things that are still held in respect. — Edgar Allan Poe

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. — Edgar Allan Poe

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. — Edgar Allan Poe

I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them.This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure. — Edgar Allan Poe

to do wrong for the wrong's sake only — Edgar Allan Poe

I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect-in terror. In this unnerved-in this pitiable condition-I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR. — Edgar Allan Poe

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. — Edgar Allan Poe

[The daguerreotype] itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science. — Edgar Allan Poe

by the five corners of my beard! — Edgar Allan Poe

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

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

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment ... — Edgar Allan Poe

She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter. He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a bride in his Art; she a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young fawn; loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was her rival; — Edgar Allan Poe

Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become. — Edgar Allan Poe

The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death — Edgar Allan Poe

A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity. — Edgar Allan Poe

Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors ... on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. — Edgar Allan Poe

The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. — Edgar Allan Poe

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. — Edgar Allan Poe

Sleep, those little slices of death - how I loathe them. — Edgar Allan Poe

FAIR river! in thy bright, clear flow Of crystal, wandering water, Thou art an emblem of the glow Of beauty - the unhidden heart - The playful maziness of art In old Alberto's daughter; But when within thy wave she looks - Which glistens then, and trembles - Why, then, the prettiest of brooks Her worshipper resembles; For in his heart, as in thy stream, Her image deeply lies - His heart which trembles at the beam Of her soul-searching eyes. — Edgar Allan Poe

Happiness is not to be found in knowledge, but in the acquisition of knowledge — Edgar Allan Poe

The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire. — Edgar Allan Poe

Something which, for want of a more definite term at present, I must be permitted to be called queer; but which Mr. Coleridge would have called mystical, Mr. Kant pantheistical, Mr. Carlyle twistical, and Mr. Emerson hyperquizzitistical. — Edgar Allan Poe

We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused
in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. — Edgar Allan Poe

On the morrow he will leave me as my hopes have flown before. — Edgar Allan Poe

It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles - the creation of supernal Beauty. — Edgar Allan Poe

I had done a deed - what was it? — Edgar Allan Poe

Other friends have flown before - On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before." Quoth the raven, "Nevermore. — Edgar Allan Poe

This maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me. — Edgar Allan Poe

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. — Edgar Allan Poe

As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. — Edgar Allan Poe

To Helen Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, The weary, way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore. On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome. Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand, Ah! Psyche, from the regions which Are Holy Land! — Edgar Allan Poe

The customs of the world are so many conventional follies. — Edgar Allan Poe

In the deepest slumber-no! In delirium-no! In a swoon-no! In death-no! even in the grave all is not lost. — Edgar Allan Poe

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. — Edgar Allan Poe

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