Thomas De Quincey Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

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
Thou only givest these gifts to man, and thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty opium!

Thomas De Quincey
Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest. Call for the grandest of all human sentiments, what is that? It is that man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.

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

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

Thomas De Quincey
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. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

Thomas De Quincey
Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.

Thomas De Quincey
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
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
Oh! just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for "the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel," bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas De Quincey
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
To man is as much reserved the prerogative of perceiving space in its higher extensions, as of geometrically constructing the relations of space.

Thomas De Quincey
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
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
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.

Thomas De Quincey