Thomas De Quincey Quotes
In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.
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.
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.
There is a necessity for a regulating discipline of exercise that, whilst evoking the human energies, will not suffer them to be wasted.
Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.
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.
Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.
No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.
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.
The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.
War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.
All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.
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.
Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.
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.
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.
Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated everlasting farewells!
I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.
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.
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.
No progressive knowledge will ever medicine that dread misgiving of a mysterious and pathless power given to words of a certain import.
As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.
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.
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.
The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.
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.
It is notorious that the memory strengthens as you lay burdens upon it, and becomes trustworthy as you trust it.
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.
