For tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities, or are become so from wine-drinking, and are not susceptible of influence from so refined a stimulant, will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual.

Thomas de Quincey

Categorized in : Tea Intellectual Beverages

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

deep-love breathing animal

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

single music men

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

procrastination drinking death

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

pleasure literature book

All that is literature seeks to communicate power

Thomas de Quincey

communicate literature

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

doubt writing thinking

It is one of the misfortunes in life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them.

Thomas de Quincey

misfortunes book needs

Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear.

Thomas de Quincey

disappear should kings

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

Thomas de Quincey

solitude doe men

Allow me to offer my congratulations on the truly admirable skill you have shown in keeping clear of the mark. Not to have hit once in so many trials, argues the most splendid talents for missing.

Thomas de Quincey

congratulations skills missing

The burden of the incommunicable.

Thomas de Quincey

burden

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

Thomas de Quincey

expeditions empires ruins

The public is a bad guesser.

Thomas de Quincey

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

Thomas de Quincey

carriages wife walks

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

Thomas de Quincey

metaphysical mathematics feet

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

Thomas de Quincey

ineffable men war

Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated everlasting farewells!

Thomas de Quincey

everlasting farewell

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

refinement elegance habit

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

Thomas de Quincey

pulpit germany style

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

Thomas de Quincey

ratios numbers promise