Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

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Indeed, there is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted.

Edgar Allan Poe
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
Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart — one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?

Edgar Allan Poe
Yet we met; and fate bound us together at the alter, and I never spoke of passion nor thought of love. She, however shunned society, and, attaching herself to me alone rendered me happy. It is a happiness to wonder; it is a happiness to dream.

Edgar Allan Poe
Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom.

Edgar Allan Poe
The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.

Edgar Allan Poe
Is there — is there balm in Gilead? — tell me — tell me, I implore!

Edgar Allan Poe
"The nitre!" I said; "see, it increases. It hangs like moss upon the vaults. We are below the river's bed."

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 all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams —
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.

Edgar Allan Poe
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

Edgar Allan Poe
By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.

Edgar Allan Poe
Many years ago, I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand. He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been wealthy; but a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want.

Edgar Allan Poe
And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? — now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.

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

Edgar Allan Poe
In her sepulcher there by the sea —
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Edgar Allan Poe
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
As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester — and this is my last jest.

Edgar Allan Poe
That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.

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
To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!

Edgar Allan Poe
Science! true daughter of old Time thou art Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes! Why prey'st thou thus upon the poet's heart, Vulture! whose wings are dull realities!

Edgar Allan Poe
We had always dwelled together, beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of the Many Colored Grass.

Edgar Allan Poe
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

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