Edgar Allan Poe was born on the 19th of January, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. He is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, Poe and his works influenced literature around the world.
Edgar Allan Poe is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in American literature. He was the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual award known as the Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre. Poe died on the 7th of October, 1849 at Church Home & Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, United States.
In this article, you will find an array of popular Edgar Allan Poe quotes and sayings.
You may also like to check out: Edgar Allan Poe Poems
60 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Life And Love
“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“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 Quote
“Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded…” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“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 Quote
“A man’s grammar, like Caesar’s wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“You call it hope — that fire of fire! It is but agony of desire.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“…the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“…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 Quote
“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 Quote
“Imperceptibly the love of these discords grew upon me as my love of music grew stronger.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“We gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“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 Quote
“Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“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 Quote
“There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“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 Quote
“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“That which you mistake for madness is but an overacuteness of the senses.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“The ninety and nine are with dreams, 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 Quote
“In criticism, I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“…that fitful strain of melancholy which will ever be found inseperable from the perfection of the beautiful.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“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 Quote
“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 Quote
“And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted — Nevermore!” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“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 Quote
“The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness – the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.”― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“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 Quote
“There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.”― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly 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 Quote
“The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls…”― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“But 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 Quote
“The rain came down upon my head – Unshelter’d. And the wind rendered me mad and deaf and blind.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Villains!’ I shrieked. ‘Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream – an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“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 Quote
“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“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 Quote
20 Short Edgar Allan Poe Quotes & Sayings
“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“We loved with a love that was more than love.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Deep in earth my love is lying. And I must weep alone.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Invisible things are the only realities.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“I dread the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results.”― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“It is a happiness to wonder; — it is a happiness to dream.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.”― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“And all I loved, I loved alone.”― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“I have great faith in fools – self-confidence my friends will call it.”― Edgar Allan Poe Quote
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Quote