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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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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
Pleasure
Propose
Literature
Seeks
Knowledge
Communicate
True
Indeed
Power
Case
Book
Cases
Instruct
Told
Amuse
Books
Antithesis

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All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
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The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.
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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.
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Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical.
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Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated everlasting farewells!
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Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.
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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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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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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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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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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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War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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