Top 69 Thomas De Quincey Quotes
#1. The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.
Thomas De Quincey
#2. Out of the ruined lodge and forgotten mansion, bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houses that are dust, the poet calls up a palingenesis.
Thomas De Quincey
#3. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.
Thomas De Quincey
#4. Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
Thomas De Quincey
#5. Reserve is the truest expression of respect towards those who are its objects.
Thomas De Quincey
#6. Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated everlasting farewells!
Thomas De Quincey
#7. Turkish opium-eaters, it seems, are absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves.
Thomas De Quincey
#8. Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.
Thomas De Quincey
#9. Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation.
Thomas De Quincey
#10. Many a man has risen to eminence under the powerful reaction of his mind in fierce counter-agency to the scorn of the unworthy, daily evoked by his personal defects, who with a handsome person would have sunk into the luxury of a careless life under the tranquillizing smiles of continual admiration.
Thomas De Quincey
#11. But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.
Thomas De Quincey
#12. For tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally of coarse nerves, or are become so from wine-drinking, and are not susceptible of influence from so refined a stimulant, will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual;
Thomas De Quincey
#13. For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days.
Thomas De Quincey
#14. Grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it is that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds. Thou shakest us with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities.
Thomas De Quincey
#15. I question whether any Turk, of all that have entered the Paradise of Opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I hounour the barbarians too much by supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an Englishman.
Thomas De Quincey
#16. Ideas! There is no occasion for them; all that class of ideas which can be available in such a case has a language of representative feelings.
Thomas De Quincey
#18. Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
Thomas De Quincey
#19. Flowers that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their coloring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children - honored as the jewelry of God ...
Thomas De Quincey
#20. To suppose a reader thoroughly indifferent to Kant, is to suppose him thoroughly unintellectual; and, therefore, though in reality he should happen not to regard him with interest, it is one of the fictions of courtesy to presume that he does.
Thomas De Quincey
#21. There is a necessity for a regulating discipline of exercise that, whilst evoking the human energies, will not suffer them to be wasted.
Thomas De Quincey
#23. Ah, reader! I would the gods had made thee rhythmical, that thou mightest comprehend the thousandth part of my labours in the evasion of cacophony.
Thomas De Quincey
#24. Here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket; portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint-bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down by the mail.
Thomas De Quincey
#25. It is notorious that the memory strengthens as you lay burdens upon it, and becomes trustworthy as you trust it.
Thomas De Quincey
#26. There is first the literature of KNOWLEDGE, and secondly, the literature of POWER. The function of the first is
to teach; the function of the second is
to move.
Thomas De Quincey
#28. Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.
Thomas De Quincey
#29. All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.
Thomas De Quincey
#30. In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.
Thomas De Quincey
#34. It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless; and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.
Thomas De Quincey
#35. No progressive knowledge will ever medicine that dread misgiving of a mysterious and pathless power given to words of a certain import.
Thomas De Quincey
#36. Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical.
Thomas De Quincey
#37. Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures.
Thomas De Quincey
#38. Allow me to offer my congratulations on the truly admirable skill you have shown in keeping clear of the mark. Not to have hit once in so many trials, argues the most splendid talents for missing.
Thomas De Quincey
#39. War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.
Thomas De Quincey
#40. A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.
Thomas De Quincey
#42. Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.
Thomas De Quincey
#43. It is an impressive truth that sometimes in the very lowest forms of duty, less than which would rank a man as a villain, there is, nevertheless the sublimest ascent of self-sacrifice. To do less would class you as an object of eternal scorn, to do so much presumes the grandeur of heroism.
Thomas De Quincey
#44. Under our present enormous accumulation of books, I do affirm that a most miserable distraction of choice must be very generally incident to the times; that the symptoms of it are in fact very prevalent, and that one of the chief symptoms is an enormous 'gluttonism' for books.
Thomas De Quincey
#45. The silence was more profound than that of midnight; and to me the silence of a summer morning is more touching than all other silence.
Thomas De Quincey
#46. I stood checked for a moment - awe, not fear, fell upon me - and whist I stood, a solemn wind began to blow, the most mournful that ever ear heard. Mournful! That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries.
Thomas De Quincey
#48. The science of style as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas and feelings, might be called the organology of style.
Thomas De Quincey
#49. Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.
Thomas De Quincey
#50. Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!
Thomas De Quincey
#51. Rightly it is said of utter, utter misery, that it 'cannot be remembered'; itself, being a rememberable thing, is swallowed up in its own chaos.
Thomas De Quincey
#52. Kant ate but once a day, and drank no beer. Of this liquor, (I mean the strong black beer,) he was, indeed, the most determined enemy. If ever a man died prematurely, Kant would say - 'He has been drinking beer, I presume.
Thomas De Quincey
#53. It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety.
Thomas De Quincey
#54. The peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of god seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity.
Thomas De Quincey
#55. As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.
Thomas De Quincey
#56. Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed! A true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.
Thomas De Quincey
#57. The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.
Thomas De Quincey
#58. Prophet of evil I ever am to myself: forced for ever into sorrowful auguries that I have no power to hide from my own heart, no, not through one night's solitary dreams.
Thomas De Quincey
#59. I do not readily believe that any man having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium will afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol,
Thomas De Quincey
#60. The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.
Thomas De Quincey
#61. Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.
Thomas De Quincey
#62. It is one of the misfortunes in life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them.
Thomas De Quincey
#63. So, then, Oxford Street, stonyhearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee.
Thomas De Quincey
#64. Far better, and more cheerfully, I could dispense with some part of the downright necessaries of life, than with certain circumstances of elegance and propriety in the daily habits of using them.
Thomas De Quincey
#65. Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.
Thomas De Quincey
#66. No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.
Thomas De Quincey
#67. I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.
Thomas De Quincey
#69. Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o'clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.
Thomas De Quincey
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