Thomas Love Peacock Quotes

There are two reasons for drinking wine...when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it... prevention is better than cure.

The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.

They have poisoned the Thames and killed the fish in the river. A little further development of the same wisdom and science will complete the poisoning of the air, and kill the dwellers on the banks. I almost think it is the destiny of science to exterminate the human race.

I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.

The juice of the grape is the liquid quintessence of concentrated sunbeams.

Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond.

I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race.

... where the Greeks had modesty, we have cant; where they had poetry, we have cant; where they had patriotism, we have cant; where they had anything that exalts, delights, or adorns humanity, we have nothing but cant, cant, cant.

Clouds on clouds, in volumes driven, curtain round the vault of heaven.

A book that furnishes no quotations, is me judice, no book, — it is a plaything.

Time is lord of thee: Thy wealth, thy glory, and thy name are his.

He kept at true good humor's mark The social flow of pleasure's tide: He never made a brow look dark, Nor caused a tear, but when he died.

My thoughts by night are often filled With visions false as fair: For in the past alone, I build My castles in the air.

When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him.

The highest wisdom and the highest genius have been invariably accompanied with cheerfulness. We have sufficient proofs on record that Shakespeare and Socrates were the most festive companions.

I never failed to convince an audience that the best thing they could do was to go away.

In a bowl to sea went wise men three, On a brilliant night of June: They carried a net, and their hearts were set On fishing up the moon.

Laughter is pleasant, but the exertion at my age is too much for me.

Death comes to all. His cold and sapless hand Waves o'er the world, and beckons us away. Who shall resist the summons?

The mountain sheep are sweeter, But the valley sheep are fatter. We therefore deemed it meeter To carry off the latter.

My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is me judice, no book,—it is a plaything.

Names are changed more readily than doctrines, and doctrines more readily than ceremonies.

How troublesome is day! It calls us from our sleep away; It bids us from our pleasant dreams awake, And sends us forth to keep or break Our promises to pay. How troublesome is day!

The critic does his utmost to blight genius in its infancy; that which rises in spite of him he will not see; and then he complains of the decline of literature.

The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.