Thomas De Quincey quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Thomas De Quincey

Thomas De Quincey Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Thomas De Quincey on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

The public is a bad guesser.

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

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

Infirmity and misery do not of necessity imply guilt.

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

Ideas! There is no occasion for them; all that class of ideas which can be available in such a case has a language of representative feelings.

The silence was more profound than that of midnight; and to me the silence of a summer morning is more touching than all other silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

the tyranny of the human face

A long, loud, and canorous peal of laughter.

Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.

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

All that is literature seeks to communicate power

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

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.

Ah, reader! I would the gods had made thee rhythmical, that thou mightest comprehend the thousandth part of my labours in the evasion of cacophony.

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.

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

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

Turkish opium-eaters, it seems, are absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves.

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

Man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.

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.

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

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

Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The burden of the incommunicable.