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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.
Thomas de Quincey
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Thomas de Quincey
Age: 74 †
Born: 1785
Born: August 15
Died: 1859
Died: December 8
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
Manchester
England
Thomas Penson De Quincey
De Quincey
Comes
Procrastination
Death
Indulge
Next
Breaking
Littles
Beer
Little
Murder
Incivility
Men
Drinking
Indulges
Think
Soon
Robbing
Thinking
Dying
Sabbath
More quotes by Thomas de Quincey
Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
Thomas de Quincey
Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.
Thomas de Quincey
For tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities, or are become so from wine-drinking, and are not susceptible of influence from so refined a stimulant, will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual.
Thomas de Quincey
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.
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
Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear.
Thomas de Quincey
A great scholar, in the highest sense of the term, is not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination bringing together from the four winds, like the Angel of the Resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life.
Thomas de Quincey
All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
Thomas de Quincey
Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.
Thomas de Quincey
No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.
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
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
Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated everlasting farewells!
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
The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.
Thomas de Quincey
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.
Thomas de Quincey
As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.
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
The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.
Thomas de Quincey
here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint-bottle and peace of mind could be sent down by the mail.
Thomas de Quincey