“The best things in life have fleas.”

Interviewed in Time (29 December 1975)

Source: Safe Haven

Attribution to Poe debunked by the Edgar Allan Poe museum https://www.poemuseum.org/blog/did-poe-really-say-that/.
Earliest known source: a 2009 comment on a South Carolina duck hunting website http://www.scducks.com/forum/showpost.php?s=facea9e6926c3094744eadf268103181&p=513562&postcount=18.
Misattributed

Source: One Minute Nonsense (1992), p. 114

Doris, Chapter 19, p. 247
2000s, At First Sight (2005)

1880s, 1880, Letter to Theo (Cuesmes, July 1880)
Variant: I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.
Context: I think that everything that is really good and beautiful, the inner, moral, spiritual and sublime beauty in men and their works, comes from God, and everything that is bad and evil in the works of men and in men is not from God, and God does not approve of it.
But I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better, that is what I keep telling myself. But you must love with a sublime, genuine, profound sympathy, with devotion, with intelligence, and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. That will lead to God, that will lead to an unshakable faith.