Top 100 Opium's Quotes
#1. It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.
Jean Cocteau
#2. Marx is only half right when he calls religion the opium of the people. It may turn a lot of people into sheep, but it turns far too many of them into tigers.
Hugh MacLennan
#3. Religion is the opium of the masses.
Karl Marx
#4. Godrot opium, he thought. But he knew that his life was inexorably tied to opium - and that without it neither The Noble House nor the British Empire could exist.
James Clavell
#5. I like the posture, but not the yoga.
I like the inebriated morning, but not the opium. I like the flower but not the garden, the moment but not the dream. Quiet, my love. Be still. I am sleeping.
Roman Payne
#6. Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood - the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body.
Jean Cocteau
#7. He who runs may see that opium and such other intoxicants and narcotics stupefy a man's soul and reduce him to a level lower than that of beasts.
Mahatma Gandhi
#8. Reading Marguerite Young's 1,200-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was like slipping into a luxurious opium dream.
Steven Moore
#9. (...) He loved his new ability to wonder freely, do what he wanted, go where he chose (...) So high on adrenaline was he that he did not notice the effect the alcohol was having upon him until he was quite drunk. By that time, an opium pipe seemed a good idea, so he tried that too.
Stephen Lloyd Jones
#10. Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.
Thomas De Quincey
#11. Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.
R. Scott Bakker
#12. Confucianism strongly condemned the use of drugs like opium.
Robert Trout
#13. Is it the smoke?' the boy said, shivering slightly. 'I've never touched the stuff, myself, but how it claws at one ... like a thorn in every one of your fingers, and a string around your heart ... and one fees it always. Nagging. Nagging.
Eleanor Catton
#14. Attention is the opium of the people
Fred Ross
#16. Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.
W. Somerset Maugham
#17. The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
Julio Cortazar
#18. Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about Taffreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire ... Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, in every possible meaning of the word.
Christopher Isherwood
#20. It's really weird how your life changes. Tonight I'm drinking water. Four years ago? Opium. Night and day, you know?
Bill Hicks
#22. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. All that I desire in life are three ...
A wilderness: A beach on the sun-drenched sea,
A puff of opium,
And thee.
Roman Payne
#24. Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were ... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God.
John Updike
#25. Opium is the only drug to' be rely'd on-all the boasted nostrums only take up time, and as the disease [is] often of short duration, or of small quantity, they have gain'd credit which they do not deserve.
Erasmus Darwin
#26. To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.
Laurie Colwin
#27. An enormous semiofficial drug-smuggling operation was established in order to improve Britain's unfavorable balance of payments with China - the direct result of the British love of tea.
Tom Standage
#28. What I like about Yves Saint Laurent Black Opium is that it's an understated scent that's somehow familiar.
Edie Campbell
#29. I'm merely exploring souls & cities
From the vantage point
Of my ivory tower built,
Built with the assistance
of Opium
That's enough, isnt it?
Jack Kerouac
#30. The artist's greatest creation began
the night he washed his memory of his failures
rubbed opium on his lips
drank the wine that women offered him
and lay down and wept.
Roman Payne
#31. Opiates are compounds derived from opium and include morphine, codeine, and a variety of related alkaloids. The term opioid is broader and includes all compounds (alkaloids or peptides) that have affinity for opioid receptors.
Alex S. Evers
#32. Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.
Tom Robbins
#33. I feel that opiates - I include opium and all its derivatives, such as morphine, heroin, pantopon, etc. - are quite useless for any sort of creative work, useful though they may be for routine work. Much of the hard physical work in the Far East is done by opium addicts.
William S. Burroughs
#34. That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.
Sebastian Faulks
#35. The real "opium of the people", distracting men's minds from their essential task, is the communist myth of an earthly paradise.
Jean Danielou
#36. It wasn't so much all the sex that robbed me of my moral bearings, but all the narcotics. I must say, there's something about opium that goes very well with lesbianism.
Alan Moore
#37. Had to run out of a cinema because the smell of the woman's perfume sitting next to me (Opium) combined with her popcorn made me retch.
Liane Moriarty
#38. The President wishes the Japanese to be very prudent about the introduction of opium, and if a treaty is made, he wishes that opium may be strictly prohibited.
Townsend Harris
#39. At first I was afraid that I would be left defenseless, that I would babble aloud the things I've always been terrified of saying. Instead, opium made me realize that I could say anything I liked without losing my identity.
Jerzy Kosinski
#40. Opium is the perfect drug for people who want to remain articulate while being completely trivial.
Tony Kushner
#41. I craved him, like an opium addict craved the pipe: the sound of his voice, the touch of his hand, his mere presence in the same room.
Jordan L. Hawk
#42. All I want in this life are three...
a moonlit beach on the starlit sea,
a breath of opium,
and thee.
Roman Payne
#43. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx
#45. In 1844, Karl Marx said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." He said this at a time when opium and opium derivatives were the only painkillers. And he said it helped a little. He might as well have said, "Religion is the aspirin of the people."
Kurt Vonnegut
#46. The expense of a war could be paid in time; but the expense of opium, when once the habit is formed, will only increase with time.
Townsend Harris
#47. History, having destroyed the religion as the opium of the people, now requires that they be given a taste of the real stuff.
Auberon Waugh
#48. The film drama is the opium of the people ... down with bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios ... long live life as it is!
Dziga Vertov
#49. about 40 million Chinese, a tenth of the country's population, were opium addicts.
Yuval Noah Harari
#50. Then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer.
Anais Nin
#51. My role is to embody the Black Opium woman - I suppose you have to be the living embodiment of all the intangible things the brand stands for.
Edie Campbell
#52. Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#53. But lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
Herman Melville
#54. Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
Jean Cocteau
#55. The delirious visions when they came to him may have owed something to opium as well as to a high temperature, since opium was then a normal remedy for ague or malaria.
Oliver Sacks
#56. Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception ... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium ... Photograph and be photographed.
Alexander Rodchenko
#57. When you're in love, your brain secretes endorphins into your blood. Organic morphine leaks out of a gland in your skull, feels like a low-grade opium rush. Some people confuse the two, the head rush and the love. You think you're in love with a person, but you're in love with a syringe.
Craig Clevenger
#58. Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
#59. If religious feeling is put in opposition to social change, then it does become an opium, but if it is joined to the struggle for social change then it is a wonderful medicine.
Fidel Castro
#60. If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe.
Kerry Thornley
#61. The British seizure of Hongkong was an aspect of one of the most ugly crimes of the British Empire: the takeover and destruction of India, and the use of India to flood China with opium.
Robert Trout
#62. We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable's handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they are overloaded.
Charles Kingsley
#63. What opium is instilled into all disaster? It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction,but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#64. Central Intelligence cutting Meo opium fields! China Lobby copping poppies in Burma! How long this Addict government support our oil-burner matter-habit
Allen Ginsberg
#65. The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
Jean Cocteau
#66. Opium and heroin had not caused our poverty and hopelessness. Rather, poverty and hopelessness had brought about an unquenchable desire to forget. After
Lisa See
#67. 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
#68. Like opium, nerve annihilation stretches up my veins to pump incinerating anguish through my body.
Poppet
#69. Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
Matthew Arnold
#70. They passed a bed of opium poppies, dispetaled now; the round, ripe seedheads were brown and dry - like Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads stuck on poles.
Aldous Huxley
#71. After fulfilling its destructive urge towards everything that is noble and good on earth, it [naive Religion] sketches, in its opium intoxication, a picture of the future situation, which differs drastically from the order of this world, since everything changes and is renewed.
Bruno Bauer
#72. Opium is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon.
Jonathan Swift
#73. Our interests are grains of opium to our consciences, but they only put it to sleep for a terrible awakening.
Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
#74. Here's your first problem," he said, pointing at a sentence. "'Religion is the opium of the people.' Well, I don't know about people, but I think you'll find that the opium of pirates is actual opium.
Gideon Defoe
#75. This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.
Anais Nin
#76. Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes.
Jean Cocteau
#77. When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#78. We call that opium, children. And don't do drugs, because DRUGS ARE BAD. Okay, I had to put that in there.
Rick Riordan
#79. 1. The Amazing Race
2. I Thought This Show Was Gonna Be About Aryans
3. Oh.
(Joe O'Neill, from Opium)
Dave Eggers
#80. Reformed, Poetic Ministry for an Opium Addict
Anonymous
#81. There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.
Oscar Wilde
#82. You know," Gabriel said, "there was a time I thought we could be friends, Will."
"There was a time I thought I was a ferret," Will said, "but that turned out to be the opium haze. Did you know it had that effect? Because I didn't.
Cassandra Clare
#83. Like a scene from the swamps of Louisiana or the mind of Poe on opium.
Dean Koontz
#84. Many Chinese saw opium as a poison introduced by foreign enemies.
Robert Trout
#85. The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.
Raymond Aron
#86. [People] somehow assume that the Internet is going to be the catalyst of change that will push young people into the streets, while in fact it may actually be the new opium for the masses which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography.
Evgeny Morozov
#87. For ten thousand dollars, I'd endorse an opium pipe.
Fanny Brice
#88. By the time writing was invented, the Greeks and Egyptians had already learned to extract opium from poppies to facilitate sleep.
Kat Duff
#89. The East India Company established a monopoly over the production of opium, shortly after taking over Bengal.
Robert Trout
#90. 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
#91. Sometimes I smoked opium. And I also took LSD - for a while, quite a lot of LSD, in fact. But I never had any bad experiences. I stopped in 1985. I'd had enough, and I don't miss it, either.
Wolfgang Beltracchi
#92. Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations - wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
Edmund Burke
#93. A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.
Czeslaw Milosz
#94. Lose myself in your blueberry eyes Magnolia, kiss your mauve lips of grapes, squeeze your fleshy, milky macaroon breasts,smell your opium breath of subconsciousness, labyrinth of desires.
Laura Gentile
#95. I think fear keeps people in mundane lives. Fear of freedom, fear of loneliness; it's a powerful opium.
John Harris
#96. And the least stupid, fleeing the herd where fate has penned them fast, take refuge in the wards of opium, so much for what is news around the world.
Charles Baudelaire
#97. A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
George Steiner
#98. We were like confirmed opium-eaters: in our moments of reason we well knew the deadly nature of our pursuit, but we certainly were not prepared to abandon its terrible delights.
H. Rider Haggard
#100. It wasn't my doing. It is the drink and the laudanum and the opium and that bloody refusal to live. That selfish grief. I thought I could change it with magic, but I can't. People will be who they are, and there is not enough magic in any world to change that.
Libba Bray
