40+ Best Dark Academia Quotes

In our digital and visual age, we have not lost our connection to words and their powerful influence.

There is no feeling like reading something and connecting deeply with it.

If you vibe with a certain mood or aesthetic, quotes bring that extra boost and memorable ones might stick with you your entire life.

I, personally, enjoy reading everything and anything about learning, writing, and arts and since you are reading this article there is a big chance you share that fondness.

Dark academia is a thrilling subculture and is depicted and many books, movies, and – obviously – quotes.

This list features some of my favorite dark academia quotes and if you have one you like that is missing, feel free to share it in the comment section.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

René Descartes

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Only the educated are free.

Epictetus

Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-called peak has been reached; for the thrill has been experienced, but the vessel has not grown.

Erich Fromm; To Have or to Be

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

René Descartes

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.

Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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

Edgar Allen Poe

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Virginia Woolf

The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too.

Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

But what does a mirror know? What can it show us of ourselves? Oh, it might reveal a few scars, and perhaps a glimpse—there, in the eyes—of our true nature. The spirit beneath the skin. Yet the deepest scars are often hidden, and though a mirror might reveal our weakness, it reflects only a fraction of our strength.

Nicholas Eames, Kings of the Wyld

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Fall in love with someone who sees the wars within you and not only chooses to stay, but chooses to stand by your side and help you fight them. Strive to find someone who cradles your dark, who embraces your light, someone who always wants to be your best when you yourself are not your best; someone who reminds you of every strong thing you are whenever you feel feeble.

Bianca Sparacino

Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Almost dead yesterday, maybe dead tomorrow, but alive, gloriously alive, today.

Robert Jordan, Lord of Chaos

I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.

Ludwig van Beethoven

When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous

I wish I knew what to do with my life, what to do with my heart…I do nothing all day, boredom settles in, I look at the sky so I get to feel even smaller than I already feel and my mind keeps poisoning itself uselessly.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath

I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process.

Vincent Willem van Gogh

Romantic obsession is my first language. I live in a world of fantasies, infatuation and love poems. Sometimes I wonder if the yearning I’ve felt for others was more of a yearning for yearning itself. I’ve pined insatiably and repeatedly: for strangers, new lovers, unrequited flames. While the subjects changed, that feeling always remained. Perhaps, then, I have not been so infatuated with the people themselves, but with the act of longing.

Melissa Broder

In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

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 Allen Poe

Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

H. P. Lovecraft

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Learning is not attained by chance; it must be sought for with ardour and diligence.

Abigail Adams

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.

Albus Dumbledore

Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.

Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are – not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad – or good – it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.

John Knowles, A Seperate Peace

Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.

Andrea Gibson

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.

Marcus Aurelius

I wish I wrote the way I thought
Obsessively
Incessantly
With maddening hunger
I’d write to the point of suffocation
I’d write myself into nervous breakdowns
Manuscripts spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal nothing
And I’d write about you
a lot more
than I should

Benedict Smith

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

Franz Kafka

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

James Baldwin

We were never supposed to be in love; for everything that exists inside a heart eventually dies.

Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie