Thomas de Quincey Quotes - Page 2

All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

I stood checked for a moment - awe, not fear, fell upon me - and whist I stood, a solemn wind began to blow, the most mournful that ever ear heard. Mournful! That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries.

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.

Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!

A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.

War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.

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.

The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.

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.

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.

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.

Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.

Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear.

Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical.

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.

Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.

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 only by them - when suddenly the voice of Christianity, counter-signing the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these.

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.

The burden of the incommunicable.

Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.

Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism.

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.

The science of style as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas and feelings, might be called the organology of style.

It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless; and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.