Thomas De Quincey Quotes
Best 16 Other Quotes by Thomas De Quincey
“A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.”
“Ah, reader! I would the gods had made thee rhythmical, that thou mightest comprehend the thousandth part of my labours in the evasion of cacophony.”
“All glories of flesh vanish, and this, the glory of infantine beauty seen in the mirror of memory, soonest of all.”
“Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.”
“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.”
“Crocodiles, you will say, are stationary. Mr. Waterton tells me that the crocodile does not change,—that a cayman, in fact, or an alligator, is just as good for riding upon as he was in the time of the Pharaohs. That may be; but the reason is that the crocodile does not live fast—he is a slow coach. I believe it is generally understood among naturalists that the crocodile is a blockhead. It is my own impression that the Pharaohs were also blockheads.”
“Es del todo evidente que, a menos que se consiga hacer más lento el ritmo colosal a que avanzos (y no cabe esperarlo) o bien -lo cual, por fortuna, es más probable- que se le opongan fuerzas contrarias de magnitud equivalente, en el sentido de la religión o la filosofía profunda, con irradiación centrífuga opuesta a esta religiosa tormenta centrípeta que nos arrastra al vórtice de lo meramente humano, lo natural es que este tumulto tan caótico, librado a sí mismo, tienda de por sí al mal, en algunos espíritus a la locura y en otros a una reactivación del letargo carnal.”
“For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm, that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature: and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my school-boy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man, it is no less true, that I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal, and have, at length, accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man ? have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me. Such a self-conquest may reasonably be set off in counterbalance to any kind of degree of self-indulgence.”
“For tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally of coarse nerves, 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;”
“Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)
’ Humbly to express
A penitential loneliness.”
“In general, the rare persons who disgusted me in this world, have been persons flourishing socially and of good reputation, as for the masquerades I have met, and they are not few, I think of them all without exception with pleasure and kindness.”
“In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.”
“It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety.”
“Rarely do things perish from my memory that are worth remembering. Rubbish dies instantly. Hence it happens that passages in Latin or English poets, which I never could have read but once (and that thirty years ago), often begin to blossom anew when I am lying awake, unable to sleep.”
“The tyranny of the human face”
“They wheeled in mazes; I spelled the steps. They telegraped from afar; I read the signals. They conspired together; and on the mirrors of darkness my eye traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols; mine are the words.”
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“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want.”
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Thomas De Quincey Sources
- All quotes by Thomas De Quincey (59 quotes)
- Biographies and Biographic Sketches (2 quotes)
- Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (11 quotes)
- On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (2 quotes)
- Suspira de Profundis (4 quotes)
- The Last Days of Immanuel Kant (2 quotes)
- Other quotes by Thomas De Quincey (16 quotes)