The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.
—Thomas Love Peacock
Topics: Poetry
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.
—Thomas Love Peacock
Topics: Wine
I never failed to convince an audience that the best thing they could do was to go away.
—Thomas Love Peacock
Topics: Praise, Audiences
Nothing can be more obvious than that all animals were created solely and exclusively for the use of man.
—Thomas Love Peacock
Topics: Animals
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.
—Thomas Love Peacock
Topics: Sympathy
Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horse pond.
—Thomas Love Peacock
Topics: Marriage, Sex
Names are changed more readily than doctrines, and doctrines more readily than ceremonies.
—Thomas Love Peacock
Topics: Names
The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.
—Thomas Love Peacock
Topics: Excess, Waste
A book that furnishes no quotations is no book—it is a plaything.
—Thomas Love Peacock
Topics: Quotations
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jonathan Swift Irish Satirist
- Evelyn Waugh British Novelist, Satirist
- Henry Fielding English Novelist
- Iris Murdoch British Novelist, Philosopher
- Pamela Hansford Johnson English Novelist
- George Borrow English Writer, Traveler
- Aldous Huxley English Humanist
- Jane Austen English Novelist
- William Makepeace Thackeray English Novelist
- Anthony Trollope English Novelist
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