Edgar Allan Poe Never Said That: 5 Poe Quotes, Debunked

Every October, Edgar Allan Poe gets busy. His face shows up on mugs, tote bags, and a thousand Instagram posts, usually next to a spooky line in a curly font. The trouble is that a lot of those lines aren't his. Some came from a jokey Twitter account. One came from a comedian's routine in a 1946 newspaper article. Poe died in 1849, so he has a strong alibi.

Here are five "Poe quotes" you'll probably see this month, where each one really came from, and then the real Poe lines, which are stranger and better than any of the fakes.

The fake Poe lines came from a tweet and a joke column. This one he really published, in 1849: "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." Shop the tee →

1. "The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls."

This one sounds right, which is exactly the problem. Quote Investigator traced it to a tweet sent on November 9, 2011, by an account called @Edgar_Allan_Poe. It wasn't Poe, of course. People read the handle as a byline, and the line has carried Poe's name ever since.

2. "If a poem hasn't ripped apart your soul, you haven't experienced poetry."

Same account, different year. Quote Investigator found it tweeted by @Edgar_Allan_Poe on May 7, 2014. By June 2021 it had more than 1,400 retweets, and it had spread to Tumblr and Pinterest. The Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, has heard enough. Its list of fakes says plainly: "I am firmly putting my foot down when I say Poe did not say this."

3. "I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!"

This one is older than the internet, and it was never Poe's. The earliest version Quote Investigator found is in a 1946 New York Times article about how comedians recycle jokes. The piece credits the comedian "Senator" Ed Ford with this switch: "Does anyone in your family suffer from insanity?" "No, they enjoy it."

Over the decades it became a bumper sticker and, fittingly, a T-shirt. The Washington Post counted it among the funniest T-shirts of summer 1997. Somewhere along the way it picked up Poe's name. The joke is real. The attribution isn't.

4. "I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat."

The Poe Museum calls this "one of the most misattributed quotes," and Check Your Fact rated it false in 2019 after asking actual Poe scholars. Jeffrey A. Savoye of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore checked his electronic copies of nearly everything ever attributed to Poe and found no such phrase. Amy Branam Armiento, then president of the Poe Studies Association, put it simply: "It's not Poe. My first clue was that it was ungrammatical." J. Gerald Kennedy answered with one word: "fake!"

Poe did love cats, though. In an 1840 piece for Alexander's Weekly Messenger about his own black cat, he told readers that "it will be remembered that black cats are all of them witches." That's the real Poe: dry, a little wicked, and grammatical.

5. "Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear."

This one is actually Poe. It's just been shuffled. The Poe Museum traces it to his story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," printed in Graham's Magazine in November 1845. Somewhere along the way the two halves swapped places and the wording got smoothed out. What Poe wrote was this:

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

Same idea, Poe's own words. The twist is who says it. In the story, that advice comes from the host of a private asylum, in a tale where almost nothing is what it seems. It reads like a wink. The internet made it a poster.

The real Poe is stranger

The fakes all have the same flavor: short, punchy, easy to put on a black background. Poe's real lines take their time. They turn back on themselves. They leave you slightly unsettled, which is the point.

Take the poem he published in 1849, the year he died. "A Dream Within a Dream" ends with a man on a beach, watching sand run through his fingers, asking whether anything holds still. Its most famous line is the one on our Dream Within a Dream tee, sweatshirt, and denim tote:

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."

Edgar Allan Poe, "A Dream Within a Dream" (1849)

Or take "Alone," which Poe wrote around 1829, when he was about twenty, in the autograph album of a young woman named Lucy Holmes. It wasn't printed until 1875, long after his death. The line that stops you is short: "And all I lov'd," then the turn, "I lov'd alone." That spelling is Poe's own, and it's the line on our Alone tee, mug, journal, and phone case.

In his story "Eleonora," Poe stands up for daydreamers. The narrator has been called mad, and he isn't so sure that's an insult. Then he says this:

"They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."

Edgar Allan Poe, "Eleonora" (first printed in The Gift for 1842; this wording is from Poe's 1845 revision)

It's the line on our They Who Dream by Day tee, for everyone who ever got in trouble for staring out a window.

The one Poe borrowed, and gave credit for

This one shows the difference between a misquote and an honest borrow. In "Ligeia" (1838), the narrator describes the woman he loved, whose face was beautiful because it wasn't perfect. To make his point, he quotes Francis Bacon, by name, right there in the story.

Bacon's essay "Of Beauty" (1625) says: "There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." Poe quoted it a little loosely, swapping Bacon's "excellent" for "exquisite," and he named "Bacon, Lord Verulam" as his source. That's why our Strangeness tee reads "There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness." and gives the credit as Francis Bacon, via Edgar Allan Poe. Bacon had the idea. Poe carried it. Both get named.

We hold ourselves to that standard, and we haven't always met it. Here's one more fake Poe line we caught, on our own shirts. It was Washington Irving's, written when Poe was fifteen.

How to spot a fake Poe quote

If the line sounds like a caption, be suspicious. If it uses modern grammar, be very suspicious. If you can't find the story, poem, or letter it came from, it probably didn't come from one. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore keeps Poe's works free online at eapoe.org, and a two-minute search there settles most arguments.

A lot of the Poe on merch isn't Poe. We built a shop that won't print the fakes. Every Poe line we carry is checked against what he actually published, and when a line is borrowed, the credit says so.