Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Thomas De Quincey

Under our present enormous accumulation of books, I do affirm that a most miserable distraction of choice must be very generally incident to the times; that the symptoms of it are in fact very prevalent, and that one of the chief symptoms is an enormous “gluttonism” for books.

Far beyond all other political powers of Christianity is the demiurgic power of this religion over the kingdoms of human opinion.

Bentley wrote a letter … upon the scriptural glosses in our present copies of Hesychius, which he considered interpolations from a later hand.

We have fixed our view on those uses of conversation which are ministerial to intellectual culture.

It was not by an insolent usurpation that Coleridge persisted in monology through his whole life.

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

Being both dramatic author and dramatic performer, he found himself heir to a twofold opprobrium, and at an era of English society when the weight of that opprobrium was heaviest.

It is an impressive truth that sometimes in the very lowest forms of duty, less than which would rank a man as a villain, there is, nevertheless, the sublimest ascent of self-sacrifice. To do less would class you as an object of eternal scorn; to do so much presumes the grandeur of heroism.

Lyrical emotion of every kind, which must be in the state of flux and reflux, or, generally, of agitation, requires the Saxon element of our language.

There is a necessity for a regulating discipline of exercise, that, whilst evoking the human energies, will not suffer them to be wasted.

Matched against the master of “ologies” in our days, the most accomplished of Grecians is becoming what the Master had become long since in competition with the political economist.

The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.

There is such a thing as keeping the sympathies of love and admiration in a dormant state, or state of abeyance.

The French have been notorious through generations for their puerile affectation of Roman forms, models, and historic precedents.

Mathematics has not a foot to stand on which is not purely metaphysical.

All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.

Milton was not an extensive or discursive thinker, as Shakspeare was: for the motions of his mind were slow, solemn, and sequacious, like those of the planets.

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.

The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.

A chapter upon German rhetoric would be in the same ludicrous predicament as Von Troil’s chapter on the snakes of Iceland, which delivers its business in one summary sentence, announcing that snakes in Iceland—there are none.

He ruined himself and all that trusted in him by crotchets that he never could explain to any rational man.

The science of style as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas and feelings, might be called the organology of style.

Often one’s dear friend talks something which one scruples to call rigmarole.

No progressive knowledge will ever medicine that dread misgiving of a mysterious and pathless power given to words of a certain import.

Criticism has not succeeded in fixing upon Pope [in his translation of Homer] any errors of ignorance. His deviations from Homer were uniformly the result of imperfect sympathy with the naked simplicity of the antique, and therefore wilful deviations, not (like those of his more pretending competitors, Addison and Tickell) pure blunders of misapprehension.