108 Quotes by Thomas De Quincey

War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.

Often one's dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

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.

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.

Dyspepsy is the ruin of most things: empires, expeditions, and everything else.

The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.

Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes.