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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
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Literary Critic
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Manchester
England
Thomas Penson De Quincey
De Quincey
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More quotes by 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
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
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
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
Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
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
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
The peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of god seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity.
Thomas de Quincey
War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.
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
The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.
Thomas de Quincey
Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear.
Thomas de Quincey
All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.
Thomas de Quincey
Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.
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
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
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
Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism.
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
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
