Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, author, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. Edgar Allan Poe stands as a giant of American literature, shaping Romanticism and Gothic fiction. A pioneer of the short story, he’s even credited with inventing detective fiction and influencing sci-fi’s beginnings. Notably, he was the first American writer to solely live off his writing, though it led to a challenging financial life. His dark and imaginative works continue to enthrall readers today.
1. “There is no beauty without some strangeness.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
2. “The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
3. “Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
4. “Those who gossip with you will gossip about you.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
5. “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
6. “The believer is happy. The doubter is wise.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
7. “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
8. “Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
9. “I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
10. “Happiness is not to be found in knowledge but in the acquisition of knowledge.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
11. “A lie travels around the world while the truth is putting her boots on.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
12. “The best things in life make you sweaty.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
13. “A wise man hears one word and understands two.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
14. “Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
15. “All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
16. “Me volví loco, con largos intervalos de horrible cordura.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
17. “And all I loved, I loved alone.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
18. “If a man deceives me once, shame on him; if he deceives me twice, shame on me.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
19. “If a poem hasn’t ripped apart your soul; you haven’t experienced poetry.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
20. “Even in the grave, all is not lost.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
21. “Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
22. “They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
23. “The past is a pebble in my shoe.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
24. “False hope is nicer than no hope at all.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
25. “Invisible things are the only realities.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
26. “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
27. “All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
28. “It is a happiness to wonder; — it is a happiness to dream.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
29. “Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
30. “Grammar is the analysis of language.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
31. “To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
32. “Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
33. “The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
34. “A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
35. “Stupidity is a talent for misconception.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
36. “Leave my loneliness unbroken.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
37. “Dreams are the eraser dust I blow off my page.
They fade into the emptiness, another dark gray day.
Dreams are only memories of the plans I had back then.
Dreams are eraser dust and now I use a pen.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
38. “A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
39. “I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
40. “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
41. “Once upon a midnight dreary.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
42. “We loved with a love that was more than love.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
43. “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?”
— Edgar Allan Poe
44. “Melancholy is … the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
45. “The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
46. “Perversity is the human thirst for self-torture.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
47. “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
48. “No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter than you and I.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
49. “You call it hope-that fire of fire! It is but agony of desire.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
50. “And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting…”
— Edgar Allan Poe
51. “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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
52. “If you run out of ideas follow the road; you’ll get there.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
53. “There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
54. “Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
55. “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
56. “I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
57. “To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!”
— Edgar Allan Poe
58. “Democracy is a very admirable form of government – for dogs.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
59. “The world is a great ocean, upon which we encounter more tempestuous storms than calms.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
60. “I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
61. “Reality is the cause of insanity among those who are in contact with it.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
62. “The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
63. “And so, being young and dipt in folly, I fell in love with melancholy.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
64. “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
65. “Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
66. “To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
67. “Art is to look at not to criticize.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
68. “I have great faith in fools, self-confidence my friends will call it.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
69. “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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
70. “Of puns, it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
71. “I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
72. “Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
73. “To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
74. “There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
75. “If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
76. “That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
77. “Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
78. “The true genius shudders at incompleteness.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
79. “It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
80. “Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
81. “I am walking like a bewitched corpse, with the certainty of being eaten by the infinite, of being annulled by the only existing Absurd.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
82. “There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad humanity must assume the aspect of Hell.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
83. “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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
84. “A man’s grammar, like Caesar’s wife, must not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
85. “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
86. “Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
87. “We gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquility in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
88. “Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
89. “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
90. “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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
91. “Who cares how time advances? I am drinking ale today.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
92. “In efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
93. “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
94. “When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
95. “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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
96. “And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
97. “Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
98. “I dread the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
99. “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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
100. “The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
101. “I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
102. “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
103. “And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but overacuteness of the senses?”
— Edgar Allan Poe
104. “In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
105. “The people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
106. “Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
107. “Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of intelligence.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
108. “It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
109. “Indeed, there is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
110. “Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
111. “The greater amount of truth is impulsively uttered; thus the greater amount is spoken, not written.
— Edgar Allan Poe
112. “In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
113. “The best chess player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess, but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
114. “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
115. “The goodness of your true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
116. “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
117. “Thou wouldst be loved? – then let thy heart
From its present pathway part not!
Being everything which now thou art,
Be nothing which thou art not.
So with the world thy gentle ways,
Thy grace, thy more than beauty,
Shall be an endless theme of praise,
And love – a simple duty.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
118. “The reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
119. “A gentleman with a pug nose is a contradiction in terms.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
120. “Gaily bedlight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado. But he grew old— This knight so bold— And o’er his heart a shadow— Fell as he found No spot of ground That looked like Eldorado. And, as his strength Failed him at length, He met a pilgrim shadow— ‘Shadow,’ said he, ‘Where can it be— This land of Eldorado?’ ‘Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,’ The shade replied,— ‘If you seek for Eldorado!”
— Edgar Allan Poe
121. “This maiden lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
122. “But Psyche uplifting her finger said: Sadly this star I mistrust.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
123. “[E]very 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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
124. “In the Heavens 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
125. “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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
126. “The ninety-and-nine are with dreams, and content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
127. “You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about money-finders.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
128. “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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
129. “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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
130. “The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
131. “It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain, but, once conceived, it haunted me day and night.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
132. “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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
133. “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
134. “Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
135. “And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted — Nevermore!”
— Edgar Allan Poe
136. “…the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long, and final scream of despair.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
137. “Come, little children, I’ll take thee away, into a land of Enchantment Come little children the time’s come to play here in my garden of Shadows Follow sweet children I’ll show thee the way through all the pain and the Sorrows Weep not poor childlen for life is this way murdering beauty and Passions Hush now dear children it must be this way to weary of life and Deceptions Rest now my children for soon we’ll away into the calm and the Quiet Come little children I’ll take thee away, into a land of Enchantment Come little children the time’s come to play here in my garden of Shadows.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
138. “Deep in earth my love is lying And I must weep alone.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
139. “I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise than he was 6000 years ago.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
140. “I fell in love with melancholy.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
141. “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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
142. “Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his health.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
143. “All works of art should begin… at the end.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
144. “And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
145. “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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
146. “Read this and thought of you: Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say.”
— Edgar Allen Poe
147. “Convinced myself, I seek not to convince.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
148. “With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
149. “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
150. “The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
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