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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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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
Produce
Class
Age
Understand
Three
Two
Esoteric
Enough
Critics
Every
Reader

More quotes by Thomas de Quincey

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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.
Thomas de Quincey
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Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures.
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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Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical.
Thomas de Quincey
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Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism.
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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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.
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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Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated everlasting farewells!
Thomas de Quincey
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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.
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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Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear.
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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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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No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.
Thomas de Quincey
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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.
Thomas de Quincey
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A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.
Thomas de Quincey
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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.
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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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