Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Life, Love and Happiness
See the beauty in the darkness through the mindfulness of these Edgar Allan Poe quotes.
March 21, 2023 6:00 AM EST
Want to see the light beckoning through the darkness?
This thoughtful collection of Edgar Allan Poe quotes will help you see things from an interesting perspective.
In the realm of mystery and horror, perhaps no greater writer comes to mind more than the name Edgar Allan Poe.
Early on, Poe proved to the world that he had the gift of the pen.
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According to a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, reading literary fiction can increase empathy and emotional intelligence.
This statistic can help underscore the value of reading Edgar Allan Poe’s works and encourage readers to engage with his quotes on a deeper level.
A few of his notable works such as “The Raven”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, and “Annabel Lee”, all continue to inspire readers even to this day.
In fact, his writings gave birth to modern detective stories.
Despite being gifted with words, his life had been riddled with its share of sorrow and hardship.
In fact, his death on October 7, 1849, was as shrouded in mystery as was his tales.
Still, he left a powerful legacy for those who would dare to follow in his footsteps.
If you enjoy unraveling mysteries hidden in darkness, check these Edgar Allan Poe quotes from his most famous poems.
If you enjoy this article, check out our most popular quote article, a list of short inspirational quotes for daily motivation.
Browse our entire collection of inspirational quotes for more motivating ideas and concepts.
Thought-provoking Edgar Allan Poe quotes
A survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts found that poetry reading has increased among young adults aged 18-24 over the past decade.
This statistic can help emphasize the continued relevance and popularity of poetry, including the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
1. “If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![“If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.” - Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about forgetting](images/edgar-allan-poe-quotes-on-dreams.png)
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2. “Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![“Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.” - Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about suffering](images/edgar-allan-poe-quotes-about-life.png)
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3. “And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![“And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.” - Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about being young and dipped in folly in love with melancholy](images/thought-provoking-edgar-allan-poe-quotes.png)
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4. “Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.” - Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality](images/edgar-allan-poe-quotes-on-madness.png)
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5. “I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.” - Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe Quotes and sayings](images/edgar-allan-poe-quotes-on-beauty.png)
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6. “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
![edgar allan poe quotes about the true genius shudders at incompleteness](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-6.jpg)
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7. “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
![edgar allan poe quotes about our present existence](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-7.jpg)
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8. “Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![edgar allan poe quotes about beauty of whatever kind](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-8.jpg)
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9. “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![edgar allan poe quotes on believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-9.jpg)
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10. “I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![edgar allan poe heart touching quotes](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-10.jpg)
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Edgar Allan Poe quotes on beauty, dreams, and madness
A survey conducted by the American Psychological Association found that stress is a major issue affecting Americans, with 44% reporting that their stress levels have increased over the past five years.
This statistic can help underscore the potential value of literature and poetry as a means of coping with stress and encourage readers to use Poe’s quotes as a tool for stress management.
11. “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![Edgar Allan Poe Quotes Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-11.jpg)
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12. “There is no exquisite beauty…without some strangeness in the proportion.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![edgar allan poe quotes about there is no exquisite beauty](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-12.jpg)
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13. “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![Edgar Allan Poe Quotes Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-13.jpg)
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14. “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![edgar allan poe quotes about I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-14.jpg)
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15. “Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![Edgar Allan Poe Quotes Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about the intelligence](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-15.jpg)
16. “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![edgar allan poe quotes about deep into that darkness peering](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-16.jpg)
17. “With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![edgar allan poe quotes about poetry](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-17.jpg)
18. “Even in the grave, all is not lost.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![Edgar Allan Poe Quotes Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about even in the grave, all is not lost](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-18.jpg)
19. “There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![edgar allan poe quotes about chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-19.jpg)
20. “I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![Edgar Allan Poe Quotes Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about I intend to put up with noting that I can put down](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-20.jpg)
More inspirational Edgar Allan Poe quotes about life
21. “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
![edgar allan poe quotes about the ninety and nine are with dreams](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-21.jpg)
22. “Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his health.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![Edgar Allan Poe Quotes Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about mysteries force a man to think](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-22.jpg)
23. “Art is to look at not to criticize.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![edgar allan poe quotes about Art is to look at not to criticize](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-23.jpg)
24. “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
![Edgar Allan Poe Quotes Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about the boundaries which divide life from death](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-24.jpg)
25. “To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![edgar allan poe quotes to elevate the soul, poetry is necessary](images/edgar-allan-poe-qoutes-25.jpg)
26. “I dread the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![Edgar Allan Poe Quotes Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about the ninety and nine are with dreams](images/edgar-allen-poe-quotes-14-min.jpg)
27. “There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.” – Edgar Allan Poe
28. “I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind.” – Edgar Allan Poe
![Edgar Allan Poe Quotes Edgar Allan Poe Quotes on believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see](images/edgar-allen-poe-quotes-4-min.jpg)
29. “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
30. “And all I loved, I loved alone.” – Edgar Allan Poe
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Powerful Edgar Allan Poe quotes
![Edgar Allan Poe Quotes Edgar Allan Poe Quotes about I loved alone](images/edgar-allen-poe-quotes-13-min.jpg)
31. “We loved with a love that was more than love.” – Edgar Allan Poe
32. “Deep in earth my love is lying/And I must weep alone.” – Edgar Allan Poe
33. “That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.” – Edgar Allan Poe
34. “Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.” – Edgar Allan Poe
35. “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…” – Edgar Allan Poe
36. “Stupidity is a talent for misconception.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
37. “Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.” – Edgar Allan Poe
38. “Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.” – Edgar Allan Poe
39. “It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.” – Edgar Allan Poe
40. “Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.” – Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe quotes that will expand your mind
41. “A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
42. “All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
43. “Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore…” ― Edgar Allan Poe
44. “There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of songwriting is, I think, one of the few.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
45. “The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
46. “I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
47. “There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm” ― Edgar Allan Poe
48. “Invisible things are the only realities.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
49. “Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
50. “The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe quotes to elevate your perspective
51. “To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.”― Edgar Allan Poe
52. “It is far more easy to get up than to come down.”― Edgar Allan Poe
53. “He who pleases is of more importance to his fellow man than he who instructs.”― Edgar Allen Poe
54. “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.”― Edgar Allan Poe
55. “I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.”― Edgar Allan Poe
56. “And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense?”― Edgar Allan Poe
57. “Because it was my crime to have no one on Earth who cared for me, or loved me.”― Edgar Allan Poe
58. “If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being?”― Edgar Allan Poe
59. “The best things in life make you sweaty.”― Edgar Allan Poe
60. “There is no beauty without some strangeness.”― Edgar Allan Poe
61. “Actually, I do have doubts, all the time. Any thinking person does. There are so many sides to every question.”― Edgar Allan Poe
62. “My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence.”― Edgar Allan Poe
63. “Art was, for Poe, the only method by which one could penetrate the shapeless empirical world in the search for order.”― Edgar Allan Poe
64. “In the Heaven’s above, the angels, whispering to one another, can find, among their burning terms of love, none so devotional as that of ‘Mother.”― Edgar Allan Poe
65. “Happiness is not to be found in knowledge, but in the acquisition of knowledge.”― Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe quotes to broaden your thoughts
66. “I smiled,—for what had I to fear?”― Edgar Allan Poe
67. “There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.”― Edgar Allan Poe
68. “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”― Edgar Allan Poe
69. “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.”― Edgar Allan Poe
70. “A million candles have burned themselves out. Still I read on.”― Edgar Allan Poe
71. “It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.”― Edgar Allan Poe
72. “And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted — Nevermore!”― Edgar Allan Poe
73. “The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn,—not the material of my every-day existence–but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.”― Edgar Allan Poe
74. “There are two bodies — the rudimental and the complete ; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call “death,” is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.”― Edgar Allan Poe
75. “Decorum — that bug-bear which deters so many from bliss until the opportunity for bliss has forever gone by.”― Edgar Allan Poe
Profound Edgar Allan Poe quotes
76. “For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams.”― Edgar Allan Poe
77. “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
78. “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
79. “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…”― Edgar Allan Poe
80. “…the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.”― Edgar Allan Poe
81. “Convinced myself, I seek not to convince.”― Edgar Allan Poe
82. “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.”― Edgar Allan Poe
83. “Love like mine can never be gotten over.”― Edgar Allan Poe
84. “No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human loveliness, do more than approach the living and breathing human beauty as it gladdens our daily path.”― Edgar Allan Poe
85. “The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.”― Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe quotes that will change your mind
86. “The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.”― Edgar Allan Poe
87. “For all we live to know is known.”― Edgar Allan Poe
88. “Be nothing which thou art not.”― Edgar Allan Poe
89. “We want characters – characters man – something novel – out of the way. We are wearied with everlasting sameness. Come drink! the wine will brighten your wits.”― Edgar Allen Poe
90. “To him, who still would gaze upon the glory of the summer sun, there comes, when that sun will from him part, a sullen hopelessness of heart.”― Edgar Allan Poe
91. “On the morrow he will leave me as my hopes have flown before.”― Edgar Allan Poe
92. “It would be mockery to call such dreariness heaven at all.”― Edgar Allan Poe
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93. “I have before suggested that a genuine blackguard is never without a pocket-handkerchief.”― Edgar Allan Poe
94. “A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul.”― Edgar Allan Poe
95. “For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique.”― Edgar Allan Poe
More Edgar Allan Poe quotes
96. “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” – Edgar Allan Poe
97. “To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!” – Edgar Allan Poe
98. “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
99. “The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls.” – Edgar Allan Poe
100. “All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.” – Edgar Allan Poe
101. “To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.” – Edgar Allan Poe
102. “If you are ever drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations.” – Edgar Allan Poe
103. “A judge at common law may be an ordinary man; a good judge of a carpet must be a genius.” – Edgar Allan Poe
104. “The memory of a past happiness is the anguish of today.” – Edgar Allan Poe
105. “Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.” – Edgar Allan Poe
106. “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
107. “The result of law inviolate is perfection–right–negative happiness. The result of law violate is imperfection, wrong, positive pain.”― Edgar Allan Poe
108. “I am walking like a bewitched corpse, with the certainty of being eaten by the infinite, of being annulled by the only existing Absurd.”― Edgar Allan Poe
109. “Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!”― Edgar Allan Poe
110. “Reaching out to her is like drinking from a memory.”― Edgar Allan Poe
Did these Edgar Allan Poe quotes give you any chills?
Reading about madness or death may seem strange – but perhaps even more so if you had been writing about them.
These are typically dark subjects that most folks would be all too happy to avoid.
However, having a great writer such as Edgar Allan Poe pen these subjects have made them less frightening.
In fact, his words made madness and death appear enigmatic.
Such is the talent that Poe left the world with.
If you enjoyed these Edgar Allan Poe quotes, be sure to share them with a friend today.
M Boyd
January 4, 2021 at 11:21 PM
FYI…Tangled web we weave quote isn’t Poe’s. It’s Sir Walter Scott’s.
A.V.Munikrishne Gowda
October 11, 2019 at 12:38 PM
Thought is a process in mind, like seed sown, it cannot be taken back and it permeates in vast galaxy. Thought is formless seed sown and it get activated by its virtue of power.
Dan Desmarais.
December 14, 2018 at 9:36 AM
Edgar Allan Poe via fountain pen,
has taught is indeed,
that in life’s flower garden,
grows also the weed!