Thomas De Quincey quotes

Thomas De Quincey was an English writer and essayist, most famous for his work "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater." His explorations of dreams, addiction, and the unconscious influenced many later writers and the development of literary Romanticism. He is regarded as a master of English prose and a pioneer in the field of autobiographical literature. Here are 19 of his quotes:

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.

Thomas De Quincey

Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities ... will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual.

Thomas De Quincey

In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.

Thomas De Quincey

Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated-everlasting farewells!

Thomas De Quincey

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

Thomas De Quincey

The burden of the incommunicable.

Thomas De Quincey

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

Thomas De Quincey

Flowers ... that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their colouring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children-honoured as the jewellery 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.

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

Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.

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

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. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

Thomas De Quincey

Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest. Call for the grandest of all human sentiments, what is that? It is that man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.

Thomas De Quincey

The public is a bad guesser.

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

Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.

Thomas De Quincey

Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.

Thomas De Quincey