Edgar Allan Poe is one of the great minds of literature.
He was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston Massachusetts, US and he died on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore, Maryland.
He is a story writer, poet, and critic.
He is one of the forerunners of the science fiction genre.
Also, he established the Gothic horror story and detective fiction.
Edgar focused on language, meter, structure, unity of mood, or effect.
In this blogpost, we would look at a list of inspiring quotes from Edgar Allan Poe on beauty, dreams, truth, courage, life, death,
Love, writing, and poetry.
Don’t forget to tell me your favorite quote at the end of the blogpost.
First I let me share this
What is a meaningful quote from Edgar Allan Poe?
1.Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.
Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Writing and Reading and Poetry
2.“In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.”
Marginalia
3.”All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”
4.“Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.”
The Philosophy of Composition
5.“Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.”
Letter to Frederick W. Thomas
6.I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.
The Poetic Principle
7.“I am actuated by an ambition which I believe to be an honourable one — the ambition of serving the great cause of truth while endeavouring to forward the literature of the country.”
Letter to Washington Poe
8″The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.”
9.“With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not — they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.”
Preface, The Raven, and Other Poems
10.“Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.”
The Philosophy of Composition
11.“How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings!”
Marginalia
12.Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.
13.It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.”
The Poetic Principle
14.“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term “Art,” I should call it “the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “Artist”.”
Marginalia
15.“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.”
Letter to Mr. B
16.“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
17.“There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.”
The Premature Burial
18.“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”
The Narrative of Arthur Gordyn Pym
19.“Melancholy is … the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.”
The Philosophy of Composition
20.”It is with literature as with law or empire – an established name is an estate in tenure or a throne in possession.”
Letter to Mr. B
21.”The generous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.”
Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Life and Death
22.”Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”
Attributed, Survival
23.”Come! let the burial rite be read–the funeral song be sung!—An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young—A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.”
Lenore
24.“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
The Philosophy of Composition
25.“Deep in earth, my love is lying
And I must weep alone.”
A couplet
26.“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?”
The Premature Burial
27.“Thank Heaven! the crisis—The danger is past, And the lingering illness, Is over at last—And the fever called “Living,” Is conquered at last.”
For Annie
28.“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?”
The Premature Burial
29.“To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!”
The Assignation
Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Dreams
30.”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.”
31.”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.”
To One in Paradise
33.“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
Eleanora
34.“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”
The Raven
35.“Arousing from the most profound of 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.”
The Pit and the Pendulum
36.“Yet mad I am not… and very surely do I not dream.”
The Black Cat
37.“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.”
Marginalia
38.”All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”
A Dream Within a Dream
Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Love
39.“We loved with a love that was more than love… With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me.”
Annabel Lee
40.”Yes, I now feel that it was then on that evening of sweet dreams—that the very first dawn of human love burst upon the icy night of my spirit. Since that period I have never seen nor heard your name without a shiver half of delight half of anxiety.”
Letter to Sarah Helen Whitman
41.“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.”
The Black Cat
42.“Because I feel that, in the Heavens above, The angels, whispering to one another, Can find, among their burning terms of love, None so devotional as that of ‘Mother.’”
To My Mother
43.“For passionate love is still divine / I lov’d her as an angel might / With ray of the all living light / Which blazes upon Edis’ shrine.”
Tamerlane
44.“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.”
The Spectacles
45.“Love like mine can never be gotten over.”
Letter to Maria Clemm
46.“O, human love! thou spirit given,
On Earth, of all, we hope in Heaven!”
Tamerlane
47.”But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—”
Annabel Lee
48.“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.”
To One in Paradise
49.“And so being young and dipt in folly
I fell in love with melancholy.”
Romance
Edgar Allan Poe’s Quotes About Beauty
50.”That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.”
51.”I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.”
52.”Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
The Philosophy Of Composition
Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Madness and Insanity
53.“That which you mistake for madness is but an over acuteness o the senses”
The Tell-Tale Heart
54.“I was never really insane, except on occasions where my heart was touched.”
Letter to Maria Clemm
55.“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
Letter to George W. Eveleth
56.“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.”
Eleonora
57.“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
Letter to George W. Eveleth
58.“I was never really insane except upon occasions where my heart was touched.”
Letter to Maria Clemm
Edgar Allan Poe’s Quotes on Humans and Living
59.”Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.”
60.”I have no faith in human perfectability. 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.”
61.”Although I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a classic regularity—although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed ‘exquisite,’ and felt that there was much of ‘strangeness’ pervading it, yet I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of ‘the strange.”
Ligeia
.
62.”I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.”
63.”Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.”
64.”Lord, help my poor soul.”
65.”Stupidity is a talent for misconception.”
66.”To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.”
67.”I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.”
68.”There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
69.”The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.”
70.“From childhood’s hour, I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.”
Alone
71.“It was a freak of fancy in my friend… to be enamored of the night for her own sake; and into this bizarrerie, as into all his others, I quietly fell; giving myself up to his wild whims with a perfect abandon.”
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
72.“The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.”
The Spectacles
73.”Whether people grow fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke, I have never been quite able to determine…”
Hop-Frog
74.“Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.”
Berenice
75.“If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”
Marginalia
76.“To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.”
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
77.“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.”
Ligeia
78.“Convinced myself, I seek not to convince.”
Berenice
79.”Decorum – that bug-bear which deters so many from bliss until the opportunity for bliss has forever gone by.”
The Spectacles
Edgar Allan Poe’s Quotes on Bravery,Courage, and Cowardice
80.”That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.”
Marginalia
81.”I have great faith in fools — self-confidence my friends will call it.”
Marginalia
82.”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’s Quotes on Truth
83.”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.”
84.”It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.”
85.”It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.”
86.”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.”
87.”We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation – to make a point – than to further the cause of truth.”
The Mystery of Marie Roget
88.”The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.”
Conclusion
Wow, that’s a lot of inspiring quotes on varying topics.
Now it’s your turn. I want to know which of Edgar Allan Poe’s Quotes is your favorite.
Let me know in the comments section 🤔.
If you have any quote from Edgar Allan Poe that I did not mention
Kindly let me know.
I would love to know.