Thomas de Quincey Quotes:

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.

source: - Thomas De Quincey (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Thomas De Quincey (Illustrated)”, p.168, Delphi Classics

Topics: Deep Love, Animal, Breathing, Living Creatures, Pet Animals

Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.

Topics: Intellectual, Tea, Beverages

The public is a bad guesser.

In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.

Topics: Wife, Carriages, Walks Of Life

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.

source: - Thomas De Quincey (2009). “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar”, p.107, The Floating Press

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Doubt

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.

source: - Thomas De Quincey (1873). “Leaders in literature”, p.5

Topics: Moving, Literature, Firsts

All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in it velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite...Upon a night of earthquake he builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow of an infant he raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious vintages that could not else have been.

Topics: Night, Men, Years

A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.

Topics: Numbers, Promise, Ratios, Binding, Inverse

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.

source: - Thomas De Quincey (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Thomas De Quincey (Illustrated)”, p.1248, Delphi Classics

Topics: Struggle, Suffering, Vision

Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.

source: - Thomas De Quincey, Grevel Lindop (1998). “The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: And Other Writings”, p.103, Oxford Paperbacks

Topics: Children, Hate, Grief, Human Eyes

No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.

source: - Thomas De Quincey (1871). “The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Suspira de profundis. General index”, p.3

Topics: Men, Solitude, Doe

It is notorious that the memory strengthens as you lay burdens upon it, and becomes trustworthy as you trust it.

Topics: Memories, Trustworthy, Notorious

Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.

Topics: Ruins, Empires, Expeditions

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.

Topics: Children, Oxford, Tears, Oxford Street, Stepmothers

Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated everlasting farewells!

Topics: Farewell, Everlasting

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.

Topics: Misery, Chaos, Said

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.

Topics: Blow, Wind, Ears

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.

Topics: Secret, Mind, Age

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....

Topics: Children, Flower, Years

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.

Topics: Music, Single, Men, Little Manhattan

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.

Topics: Sunday, Afternoon, Earth, Sunday Afternoons, Rainy Sunday

Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical.

Topics: Feet, Mathematics, Metaphysical

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.

Topics: Peace, Men, Long

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.

Topics: Rain, Wind, Tea, Wind And Rain

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

source: - "On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (1839)

Topics: Death, Drinking, Procrastination, Incivility

Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!

Topics: Keys, Drug, Paradise, Medicinal Herbs, Opium

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, the first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy.

Topics: Moving, Understanding, Literature

As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.

source: - Thomas De Quincey, James Thomas Fields (1851). “De Quincey's Writings: Miscellaneous essays. 1851”, p.24

Topics: Art, Father, Philosophy

The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.

source: - Thomas De Quincey (1853). “De Quincey's works”, p.85

Topics: Girl, Laughter, Earth

A great scholar, in the highest sense of the term, is not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the Angel of the Resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life.

Topics: Memories, Angel, Men, Electrical Power, Breathing Life

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.

Topics: Powerful, Men, Luxury, Deformity

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.

Topics: Sacrifice, Men, Self

All that is literature seeks to communicate power

source: - 'Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected' no. 3, in the 'London Magazine' January-July 1823. De Quincey adds that he is indebted for this distinction to 'many years' conversation with Mr Wordsworth'

Topics: Literature, Communicate

The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.

Topics: Style, Germany, Pulpit, Pedantry

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.

Topics: Elegance, Habit, Refinement, Daily Habits

Reserve is the truest expression of respect towards those who are its objects.

Topics: Expression, Truest

Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism.

Topics: Fierce, Sectarianism

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.

source: - 'Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected' no. 3, in the 'London Magazine' January-July 1823. De Quincey adds that he is indebted for this distinction to 'many years' conversation with Mr Wordsworth'

Topics: Book, Literature, Pleasure

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.

Topics: Depressing, Art, Grief

No progressive knowledge will ever medicine that dread misgiving of a mysterious and pathless power given to words of a certain import.

Topics: Medicine, Mysterious, Progressive, Misgivings

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.

Topics: Ideas, Feelings, Style

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 only by them - when suddenly the voice of Christianity, counter-signing the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these.

Topics: Children, Flower, Years

Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.

source: - Thomas De Quincey, Robert Morrison (2013). “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings”, p.39, Oxford University Press

Topics: Laughing, Long, Pleasure, Opium, Complexion

Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.

Topics: Sun, Spectacles

Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.

source: - Thomas De Quincey, James Thomas Fields (1851). “De Quincey's Writings: Miscellaneous essays. 1851”, p.22

Topics: Perfect, May, States, Perfection And Imperfection

The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.

Topics: Understanding, Mind, Faculty

Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear.

source: - Thomas De Quincey (1826). “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. By T. De Quincey”, p.90

Topics: Kings, Disappear, Should

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.

source: - Thomas De Quincey (1841). “Confessions of an English Opium-eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar”, p.89

Topics: Men, Alcohol, Sobriety, Liquor Funny, Drinking Alcohol

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.

source: - Thomas De Quincey (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Thomas De Quincey (Illustrated)”, p.1655, Delphi Classics

Topics: Congratulations, Skills, Missing

War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.

Topics: War, Men, Ineffable

The burden of the incommunicable.

Topics: Burden

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.

Topics: Book, Choices, Facts

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

Topics: Class, Two, Age

Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.

Topics: Scruples, Dear Friend, Dear

The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.

source: - Thomas De Quincey, James Thomas Fields (1854). “De Quincey's Writings: Theological essays and other papers. 1854”, p.94

Topics: Art, Irritation, Development

All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.

source: - Thomas De Quincey, James Thomas Fields (1854). “De Quincey's Writings: Essays on philosophical writers and other men of letters. 1854-60. [v. 14 stereotyped”, p.103

Topics: Knowledge, Metaphysics

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.

Topics: Dust, Feet, House, Mansions, Lodges

There is a necessity for a regulating discipline of exercise that, whilst evoking the human energies, will not suffer them to be wasted.

Topics: Fitness, Exercise, Discipline, Physical Fitness, Exercise And Fitness

For tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities, 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.

source: - "The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Including All His Contributions to Periodical Literature".

Topics: Intellectual, Tea, Beverages, Coarse, Coffee And Tea

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.

Topics: Book, Needs, Misfortunes

I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.

source: - Thomas De Quincey (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Thomas De Quincey (Illustrated)”, p.265, Delphi Classics

Topics: Memories, Forget, Feels

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 only by them - when suddenly the voice of Christianity, counter-signing the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these.

source: - "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater". Book by Thomas de Quincey, 1821.

Topics: Children, Flower, Clouds