Thomas de Quincey Quotes
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Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
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Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.
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The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.
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Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.
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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.
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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.
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I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.
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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.
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But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.
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Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.
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Many a man has risen to eminence under the powerful reaction of his mind in fierce counter-agency to the scorn of the unworthy, daily evoked by his personal defects, who with a handsome person would have sunk into the luxury of a careless life under the tranquillizing smiles of continual admiration.
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No progressive knowledge will ever medicine that dread misgiving of a mysterious and pathless power given to words of a certain import.
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No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.
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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.
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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.
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The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.
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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.
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All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.
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As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.
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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.
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All that is literature seeks to communicate power
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All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
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Far better, and more cheerfully, I could dispense with some part of the downright necessaries of life, than with certain circumstances of elegance and propriety in the daily habits of using them.
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Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.
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In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.
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It is notorious that the memory strengthens as you lay burdens upon it, and becomes trustworthy as you trust it.
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