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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

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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
Come
Silence
Solitude
Men
Leave
Essential
Like
Alone
Essentials
World
Though
Hearing
Sound
Silent
Mightiest
Light
Quiet
Agencies
May
Listening
Agency
Music
Single
Noise

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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.
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A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.
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Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical.
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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.
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War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.
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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.
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But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.
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All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.
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The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.
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Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
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All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
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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.
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Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.
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Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.
Thomas de Quincey
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Flowers that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their coloring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children - honored as the jewelry of God.
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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.
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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