Thomas De Quincey - Man Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
If a man "whose talk is of oxen" should become an opium-eater, the probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all)—he will dream about oxen.

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

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
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