Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Thomas de Quincey (English Essayist, Critic)

Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) was an English critic and writer of periodical essay. He achieved fame with his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822,) a study of his addiction to opium containing vivid descriptions of the psychological effects of the drug.

Born in Manchester, the son of a merchant, de Quincey was educated at Manchester Grammar School but ran off to the homeless wanderings in Wales and London, which he was to describe in Confessions. He then spent a short time at Oxford’s Worcester College, and it was here that he became addicted to opium. Then legal, opium was a common painkiller that was sold in liquid form as laudanum.

A visit to his mother in Bath, Somerset, brought de Quincey into contact with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth. After a brief stay in London where de Quincey met Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and others of the ‘Cockney School;’ he went to stay in Cambria in 1809.

Except for The Logic of Political Economy (1841) and one unsuccessful novel, de Quincey’s complete literary output, including the Confessions, consisted of periodical essays. The Confessions appeared as a serial in The London Magazine in 1821 and immediately made him famous. The first drug addiction memoir, it greatly influenced later generations of bohemian writers, from Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe to William S. Burroughs.

De Quincey lived in Edinburgh from 1828 and wrote for Blackwood’s Magazine, Tait’s Magazine, and The Quarterly. His famous articles include Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827,) Lake Reminiscences (1834–40,) the fantasy Levan and Our Ladies of Sorrows (1845,) and Vision of Sudden Death (1849.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Thomas de Quincey

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.
Thomas de Quincey

I cannot think that any man could ever tower upward into a very great philosopher unless he should begin or end with Christianity.—A great man may, by a rare possibility, be an infidel.—An intellect of the highest order must build on Christianity.
Thomas de Quincey
Topics: Christian

The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.
Thomas de Quincey
Topics: Laughter

Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
Thomas de Quincey
Topics: Beauty

Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!
Thomas de Quincey
Topics: Drugs

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; all leave it alone.
Thomas de Quincey
Topics: Solitude

Much has been accomplished; more than people are aware—so gradual has been the advance. How noiseless is the growth of corn! Watch it night and day for a week, and you will never see it growing; but return after two months, and you will find it all whitening for the harvest. Such, and so imperceptible in the stages of their motion are the victories of the press.
Thomas de Quincey

Flowers that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their coloring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children—honored as the jewelry 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
Topics: Flowers

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think very little of robbing, and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
Thomas de Quincey
Topics: Pleasure

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

Whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation and harmony. Wine robs a man of self-possession; opium greatly invigorates it.
Thomas de Quincey

There, is first, the literature of knowledge; and, secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is, to teach; of the second is, to move; the first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy.
Thomas de Quincey
Topics: Literature

Many a man has risen to eminence under the powerful reaction of his mind against 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 tranquilizing smiles of continual admiration.
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

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.
Thomas de Quincey
Topics: Animals

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

Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.
Thomas de Quincey

In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.
Thomas de Quincey
Topics: Conscience

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
Topics: Murder

Man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.
Thomas de Quincey
Topics: Anger

Reserve is the truest expression of respect toward those who are its objects.
Thomas de Quincey

That memory is the book of judgment, from some opium experiences of mine, I can believe. I have, indeed, seen the same thing asserted in modern books, and accompanied by a remark which I am convinced is true, namely: that the dread book of account, which the Scriptures speak of is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. Of this, at least, I feel assured—that there is no such thing as forgetting, possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains forever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day; whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are waiting to be revealed, when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.
Thomas de Quincey
Topics: Memory

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