Thomas Love Peacock QUOTES

1 " On the top of Cadair Idris,
I felt how happy a man might be
with a little money and a sane intellect,
and reflected with astonishment and pity
on the madness of the multitude. "

― Thomas Love Peacock

2 " I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Gryll Grange

3 " Modern literature is a north-east wind--a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

4 " If we go on in this way, we shall have a new art of poetry, of which one of the first rules will be: To remember to forget that there are any such things as sunshine and music in the world. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

5 " He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

6 " She discovered, when it was too late, that she had mistaken the means for the end—that riches, rightly used, are instruments of happiness, but are not in themselves happiness. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

7 " Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools? "

― Thomas Love Peacock

8 " When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

9 " The juice of the grape is the liquid quintessence of concentrated sunbeams. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Melincourt; Or Sir Oran Hautton

10 " Castles in the Air

My thoughts by night are often filled
With visions false as fair:
For in the past alone I build
My castles in the air.

I dwell not now on what may be:
Night shadows o'er the scene:
But still my fancy wanders free
Through that which might have been. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Delphi Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 19)

11 " Now I should rather suppose there is no reason for it: it is the fashion to be unhappy. To have a reason for being so would be exceedingly commonplace: to be so without any is the province of genius. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

12 " Tea, late dinners and the French Revolution. I cannot exactly see the connection of ideas. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

13 " But still my fancy wanders free
Through that which might have been. "

― Thomas Love Peacock

14 " The explanation, said Mr Glowry, is very satisfactory. The Great Mogul has taken lodgings at Kensington, and the external part of the ear is a cartilaginous funnel. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

15 " There is a time for every thing under the sun. You may as well dine first, and be miserable afterwards. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

16 " Mr Flosky suddenly stopped: he found himself unintentionally trespassing within the limits of common sense. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

17 " The critic does his utmost to blight genius in his infancy. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

18 " Surely not without reason, when pirates, highwaymen, and other varieties of the extensive genus Marauder, are the only beau ideal of the active, as splenetic and railing misanthropy is of the speculative energy. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

19 " What do we see by [our enlightened age] which our ancestors saw not, and which at the same time is worth seeing? We see a hundred men hanged, where they saw one. We see five hundred transported, where they saw one. We see five thousand in the workhouse, where they saw one. . . . We see children perishing in manufactories, where they saw them flourishing in the fields. We see prisons, where they saw castles. We see masters, where they saw representatives. In short, they saw true men, where we see false knaves. They saw Milton, and we see Mr. Sackbut. "

― Thomas Love Peacock , Nightmare Abbey

20 " I perceive , Sir , you are one of those who love an authority more than a reason "

― Thomas Love Peacock

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