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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

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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
Either
Searching
Suffering
Shallow
Human
Revelations
Humans
Suffer
Without
Price
Must
Intellectual
Struggle
Gaze
Vision
Revelation

More quotes by Thomas de Quincey

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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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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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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.
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.
Thomas de Quincey
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Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.
Thomas de Quincey
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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.
Thomas de Quincey
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Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.
Thomas de Quincey
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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
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Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.
Thomas de Quincey
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The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.
Thomas de Quincey
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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.
Thomas de Quincey
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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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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
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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.
Thomas de Quincey
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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.
Thomas de Quincey
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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
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All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.
Thomas de Quincey
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War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.
Thomas de Quincey
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Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism.
Thomas de Quincey
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Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
Thomas de Quincey