Top 60 Thomas de Quincey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Thomas de Quincey

2. “Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.”

— Thomas de Quincey

3. “All that is literature seeks to communicate power.”

— Thomas de Quincey

4. “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

5. “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 and leave it alone.”

— Thomas de Quincey

6. “Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear.”

— Thomas de Quincey

7. “Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.”

— Thomas de Quincey

8. “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.”

— Thomas de Quincey

9. “Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed! A true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.”

— Thomas de Quincey

10. “The public is a bad guesser.”

— Thomas de Quincey

11. “All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.”

— Thomas de Quincey

12. “The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.”

— Thomas de Quincey

13. “I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.”

— Thomas de Quincey

14. “No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.”

— Thomas de Quincey

15. “Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical.”

— Thomas de Quincey

16. “It is an impressive truth that sometimes in the very lowest forms of duty, less than which would rank a man as a villain, there is, nevertheless the sublimest ascent of self-sacrifice. To do less would class you as an object of eternal scorn, to do so much presumes the grandeur of heroism.”

— Thomas de Quincey

17. “Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!”

— Thomas de Quincey

18. “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...”

— Thomas de Quincey

19. “So, then, Oxford Street, stonyhearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee.”

— Thomas de Quincey

20. “In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.”

— Thomas de Quincey

21. “It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety.”

— Thomas de Quincey

22. “The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.”

— Thomas de Quincey

23. “Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o’clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.”

— Thomas de Quincey

24. “Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.”

— Thomas de Quincey

25. “Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation.”

— Thomas de Quincey

26. “All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.”

— Thomas de Quincey

27. “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

28. “The burden of the incommunicable.”

— Thomas de Quincey

29. “The peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of god seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity.”

— Thomas de Quincey

30. “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

31. “Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism.”

— Thomas de Quincey

32. “There is a necessity for a regulating discipline of exercise that, whilst evoking the human energies, will not suffer them to be wasted.”

— Thomas de Quincey

33. “As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.”

— Thomas de Quincey

34. “I stood checked for a moment – awe, not fear, fell upon me – and whist I stood, a solemn wind began to blow, the most mournful that ever ear heard. Mournful! That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries.”

— Thomas de Quincey

35. “A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.”

— Thomas de Quincey

36. “If in this world there is one misery having no relief, it is the pressure on the heart from the Incommunicable. And if another Sphinx should arise to propose another enigma to man–saying, what burden is that which only is insupportable by human fortitude? I should answer at once: It is the burden of the Incommunicable.”

— Thomas de Quincey

37. “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

38. “Oh! just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for ‘the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,’ bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood...”

— Thomas de Quincey

39. “The science of style as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas and feelings, might be called the organology of style.”

— Thomas de Quincey

40. “Ideas! There is no occasion for them; all that class of ideas which can be available in such a case has a language of representative feelings.”

— Thomas de Quincey

41. “No progressive knowledge will ever medicine that dread misgiving of a mysterious and pathless power given to words of a certain import.”

— Thomas de Quincey

42. “Grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it is that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds. Thou shakest us with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities.”

— Thomas de Quincey

43. “For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days.”

— Thomas de Quincey

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

— Thomas de Quincey

45. “The silence was more profound than that of midnight; and to me the silence of a summer morning is more touching than all other silence.”

— Thomas de Quincey

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

— Thomas de Quincey

47. “Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated everlasting farewells!”

— Thomas de Quincey

48. “Many a man has risen to eminence under the powerful reaction of his mind in fierce counter-agency to 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 tranquillizing smiles of continual admiration.”

— Thomas de Quincey

49. “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

50. “The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.”

— Thomas de Quincey