Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

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

Horrors of a nature most stern and most appalling would too frequently obtrude themselves upon my mind, and shake the innermost depths of my soul with the bare supposition of their possibility.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood's hour I have not beenAs others were - I have not seenAs others saw - I could not bringMy passions from a common spring -

~ Edgar Allan Poe

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

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes — die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

I have before suggested that a genuine blackguard is never without a pocket-handkerchief.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into recesses if his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

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

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

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

This apartment, which you no doubt profanely suppose to be the shop of Will Wimble the undertaker --a man whom we know not, and whose plebeian appellation has never before this night thwarted our royal ears --this apartment, I say, is the Dais-Chamber of our Palace, devoted to the councils of our kingdom, and to other sacred and lofty purposes.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating, 'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door- Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;- This it is, and nothing more.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea,But we loved with a love that was more than love— I and my Annabel Lee—

~ Edgar Allan Poe

The principle of vis inertiae (...) seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed, and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress

~ Edgar Allan Poe

There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities---that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

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

From the dim regions beyond the mountains at the upper end of our encircled domain, there crept out a narrow and deep river, brighter than all save the eyes of Eleonora; and, winding stealthily about in mazy courses, it passed away, at length, through a shadowy gorge, among hills still dimmer than those whence it had issued. We called it the River of Silence; for there seemed to be a hushing influence in its flow. No murmur arose from its bed, and so gently it wandered along, that the pearly pebbles upon which we loved to gaze, far down within its bosom, stirred not at all, but lay in a motionless content, each in its own old station, shining on gloriously forever.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

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

I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Deep in earth my love is lyingAnd I must weep alone.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was. 

~ Edgar Allan Poe

It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts! How often, Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its nature! How mysteriously did it act as a check to human bliss - saying unto it thus far, and no farther!

~ Edgar Allan Poe

He knew that Hop-Frog was not fond of wine, for it excited the poor cripple almost to madness, and madness is no comfortable feeling.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

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

A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Ceux qui revent eveilles ont conscience de 1000 choses qui echapent a ceux qui ne revent qu'endormis.The one who has day dream are aware of 1000 things that the one who dreams only when he sleeps will never understand.(it sounds better in french, I do what I can with my translation...)

~ Edgar Allan Poe

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

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

I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

But, for myself, the Earth’s records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization.

~ Edgar Allan Poe