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As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.
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
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Father
Art
Cain
Firsts
Inventor
First
Murder
Must
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Men
Genius
Philosophy
More quotes by Thomas de Quincey
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
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
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
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
No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.
Thomas de Quincey
Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.
Thomas de Quincey
Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.
Thomas de Quincey
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
Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear.
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
The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.
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
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
Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.
Thomas de Quincey
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
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
Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism.
Thomas de Quincey
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
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
