Quotes from Thomas Love Peacock

I perceive , Sir , you are one of those who love an authority more than a reason

Castles in the Air My thoughts by night are often filled With visions false as fair: For in the past alone I build My castles in the air. I dwell not now on what may be: Night shadows o'er the scene: But still my fancy wanders free Through that which might have been.

And as for the human mind, I deny that it is the same in all men.  I hold that there is every variety of natural capacity from the idiot to Newton and Shakespeare; the mass of mankind, midway between these extremes, being blockheads of different degrees; education leaving them pretty nearly as it found them, with this single difference, that it gives a fixed direction to their stupidity, a sort of incurable wry neck to the thing they call their understanding. 

If we go on in this way, we shall have a new art of poetry, of which one of the first rules will be: To remember to forget that there are any such things as sunshine and music in the world.

You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.

Modern literature is a north-east wind--a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it.

what was in those days called social order, namely, the preservation of the privileges of the few who happened to have any, at the expense of the swinish multitude who happened to have none, except that of working and being shot at for the benefit of their betters:

They had set an example of profligate contempt for truth, of which the success was in proportion to the effrontery, and when their prosperity had filled the market with competitors, they cried out against their own reflected sin, as if they had never committed it, or were entitled to a monopoly of it.

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

Seamen three! what men be ye? Gotham's three Wise Men we be. Whither in your bowl so free? To rake the moon from out the sea. The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine, And our ballast is old wine.

Sir, I have quarrelled with my wife; and a man who has quarrelled with his wife is absolved from all duty to his country.

Nothing can be more obvious than that all animals were created solely and exclusively for the use of man.

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

Ancient sculpture is the true school of modesty. But 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Laughter ispleasant, butthe exertion istoomuchfor me.

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