Thomas De Quincey Short Quotes

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Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas De Quincey
There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power.

Thomas De Quincey
Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!

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

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

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

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
Thou only givest these gifts to man, and thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty 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
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
Oxford Street, stony-hearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children.

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

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
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
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
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
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.

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
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