Thomas de Quincey Quotes About Pleasure

Quotes about: Pleasure

• 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

  Rain, Wind, Tea

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

  Thomas de Quincey

  Long, Laughing, Pleasure

  Thomas De Quincey, Robert Morrison (2013). “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings”, p.39, Oxford University Press

• 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.

  Thomas de Quincey

  Moving, Understanding, Literature

  Thomas De Quincey (1873). “Leaders in literature”, p.5

• Out of the ruined lodge and forgotten mansion, bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houses that are dust, the poet calls up a palingenesis.

  Thomas de Quincey

  Dust, Feet, Poetry

  Thomas De Quincey (1853). “Essays on the Poets: And Other English Writers”, p.12, Boston, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields

• 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

  Book, Literature, Pleasure

  'Letters to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected' no. 3, in the 'London Magazine' January-July 1823. De Quincey adds that he is indebted for this distinction to 'many years' conversation with Mr Wordsworth'

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