Quotes from Thomas Love Peacock

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.

The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.

Not drunk is he who from the floor - Can rise alone and still drink more; But drunk is They, who prostrate lies, Without the power to drink or rise.

A book that furnishes no quotations is no book - it is a plaything.

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

There are two reasons for drinking: one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it.

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

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

Man yields to death; and man's sublimest works Must yield at length to Time.

Time, the foe of man's dominion, Wheels around in ceaseless flight, Scattering from his hoary pinion Shades of everlasting night.

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

Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?

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.

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; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head.

Now I should rather suppose there is no reason for it: it is the fashion to be unhappy. To have a reason for being so would be exceedingly commonplace: to be so without any is the province of genius.

Tea, late dinners and the French Revolution. I cannot exactly see the connection of ideas.

But still my fancy wanders free Through that which might have been.

He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse.

On the top of Cadair Idris, I felt how happy a man might be with a little money and a sane intellect, and reflected with astonishment and pity on the madness of the multitude.

There is a time for every thing under the sun. You may as well dine first, and be miserable afterwards.

Mr Flosky suddenly stopped: he found himself unintentionally trespassing within the limits of common sense.

The critic does his utmost to blight genius in his infancy.

Surely not without reason, when pirates, highwaymen, and other varieties of the extensive genus Marauder, are the only beau ideal of the active, as splenetic and railing misanthropy is of the speculative energy.