Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

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
It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

Edgar Allan Poe
A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this — that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made, not to understand, but to feel, as crime.

Edgar Allan Poe
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Edgar Allan Poe
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
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

Edgar Allan Poe
I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence.

Edgar Allan Poe
Our telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us on every hand - notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the priesthood - that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty.

Edgar Allan Poe
Thou wast that all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine —
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine,
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
And all the flowers were mine.

Edgar Allan Poe
TRUE! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?

Edgar Allan Poe
Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll!-a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?-weep now or nevermore!

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
"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! — prophet still, if bird or devil!"

Edgar Allan Poe
There are some qualities, some incorporate things, that have a double life, which thus is made. A type os twin entity which springs from matter and light, envinced in solid and shade.

Edgar Allan Poe
If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.

Edgar Allan Poe
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.

Edgar Allan Poe
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
Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.

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

Edgar Allan Poe
There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.

Edgar Allan Poe