Thomas de Quincey
Thomas de Quincey
Thomas Penson De Quinceywas an English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Many scholars suggest that in publishing this work De Quincey inaugurated the tradition of addiction literature in the West...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth15 August 1785
art father philosophy
As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.
burden
The burden of the incommunicable.
war men ineffable
War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.
scruples dear-friend dear
Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.
class two age
Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.
book choices facts
Under our present enormous accumulation of books, I do affirm that a most miserable distraction of choice must be very generally incident to the times; that the symptoms of it are in fact very prevalent, and that one of the chief symptoms is an enormous 'gluttonism' for books.
moving understanding literature
There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is--to teach; the function 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, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy.
The public is a bad guesser.
wife carriages walks-of-life
In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.
writing thinking doubt
But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.
ruins empires expeditions
Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.
art irritation development
The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.
children hate grief
Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.
tea intellectual beverages
Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.