Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

276 Sourced Quotes

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
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
After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Edgar Allan Poe
I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make; and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see.

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
When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect - they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul - not of intellect, or of heart.

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
And as, in ethics, Evil is a consequence of Good, so, in fact, out of Joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

Edgar Allan Poe
It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma... which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.

Edgar Allan Poe
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
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