Thomas De Quincey

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

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

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

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

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.

Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!

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.

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.

Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest. Call for the grandest of all human sentiments, what is that? It is that man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.

The burden of the incommunicable.

For 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. Once begin [sic] upon this …

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