Thomas De Quincey Quotes

I always think it's interesting to dig a little bit deeper every time you go to someplace that seems like a revelation or a strong connection to an emotional truth.

Suffering without understanding in this life is a heap worse than suffering when you have at least the grain of an idea what it's all for.

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

I have always fought for ideas - until I learned that it isn't ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.

I know some people that have gone through serious struggles. People that were close to me, and I've seen some terrible things about people who lose it. So I think that type of pain is something that's human and that, actually, can help us look at ourselves a little bit.

Experience is the extract of suffering.

One often learns more from ten days of agony than ten years of contentment.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.

One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment.

Those who suffer profoundly are granted profound wisdom.

I have always thought that by observing things with a great deal of attention you eventually wrest some of their secrets from them, making them utter what they would most like to keep to themselves.

The manner in which one single ray of light, one single precious hint, will clarify and energize the whole mental life of him who receives it, is among the most wonderful and heavenly of intellectual phenomena.

To labour is the lot of man below; And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.

Devoutly the teachers point out huge fumigated domes; but beneath the statues there's no love, no love beneath the eyes set in crystal. Love is there, in flesh ripped by thirst, in the tiny hut struggling against the flood; love is there, in ditches where snakes of hunger wrestle, in the sad sea that rocks dead gulls, and in the darkest stinging kiss under pillows.

Calculus is the outcome of a dramatic intellectual struggle which has lasted for twenty-five hundred years.

The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.

Only two things can reveal life's great secrets: suffering and love.

Labor came to humanity with the fall from grace and was at best a penitential sacrifice enabling purity through humiliation. Laborwas toil, distress, trouble, fatigue--an exertion both painful and compulsory. Labor was our animal condition, struggling to survive in dirt and darkness.

I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.

You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery, and death. You have to wade through to record them.

You know, you struggle and cry and moan and thrash around and beat your head against the wall... and then you realize that you're just yourself, and you come to terms with yourself struggling. There are some serious, serious things to deal with in terms of the immensity of the suffering that we humans create for ourselves and for the world around us.

You would not easily guess All the modes of distress Which torture the tenants of earth; And the various evils, Which like so many devils, Attend the poor souls from their birth.

To suffer and to endure is the lot of humanity.