Quotes from Thomas de Quincey

Ideas! There is no occasion for them; all that class of ideas which can be available in such a case has a language of representative feelings.

I do not readily believe that any man having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium will afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol

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.

A long, loud, and canorous peal of laughter.

the tyranny of the human face

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.

Infirmity and misery do not of necessity imply guilt.

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

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;

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh! just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for 'the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,' bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood....

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.

No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.

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

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

If a man "whose talk is of oxen" should become an opium-eater, the probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all)—he will dream about oxen.

Thou only givest these gifts to man, and thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty opium!

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.

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

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

There is a necessity for a regulating discipline of exercise that, whilst evoking the human energies, will not suffer them to be wasted.