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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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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
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Writer
Manchester
England
Thomas Penson De Quincey
De Quincey
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More quotes by Thomas de Quincey
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
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
The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.
Thomas de Quincey
Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.
Thomas de Quincey
Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside candles at four o'clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.
Thomas de Quincey
As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.
Thomas de Quincey
Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.
Thomas de Quincey
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
The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.
Thomas de Quincey
The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.
Thomas de Quincey
A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.
Thomas de Quincey
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
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
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
Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.
Thomas de Quincey
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
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
Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated everlasting farewells!
Thomas de Quincey
Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
Thomas de Quincey
All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.
Thomas de Quincey