Thomas De Quincey

“O 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.”

“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.”

“Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, one of the most powerful agents; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone, all leave it alone.”

“There is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind.”

“For tea... will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual.”

“Here was the secret of happiness... happiness might be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket.”

“The public is a very strange beast; one can never be sure of it.”

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

“The past is not a dead thing, but a living presence.”

“Not to sympathize with the sorrows of childhood is not to be a man.”

“Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude.”

“The machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing.”

“It is the first necessity of a gentleman to be forgotten.”

“All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in its velocity of flight towards death.”

“Logic, therefore, as the science of the formal laws of thought, is the least ambitious of all sciences; it is also the most certain of all.”