Thomas de Quincey

“Man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.”

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

“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.”

“נאמר בטעות על אדם שיכור שהוא לא עצמו. ההיפך הוא הנכון, אדם לא עצמו דווקא כשהוא פיכח.”

“הבטחה היא מחייבת ביחס הפוך למספר האנשים להם הובטחה.”

“האדם צריך לשכוח את כעסו לפני שהוא הולך לישון.”

“כאב הבדידות מוכר לאדם בכל אחד משלבי החיים.”

“החיים שלי בכללותם היו חיים של פילוסוף.”

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

“Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)’ Humbly to expressA penitential loneliness.”

“Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The public is a bad guesser.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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