Thomas Love Peacock > Quotes

“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

“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

“The juice of the grape is the liquid quintessence of concentrated sunbeams.”
― Thomas Love Peacock, Melincourt; Or Sir Oran Hautton

“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

“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

“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

“But still my fancy wanders free
Through that which might have been.”
― Thomas Love Peacock

“Tea, late dinners and the French Revolution. I cannot exactly see the connection of ideas.”
― Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

“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

“The critic does his utmost to blight genius in his infancy.”
― Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Mr Flosky suddenly stopped: he found himself unintentionally trespassing within the limits of common sense.”
― Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

“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

“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)

“And as for the human mind, I deny that it is the same in all men.  I hold that there is every variety of natural capacity from the idiot to Newton and Shakespeare; the mass of mankind, midway between these extremes, being blockheads of different degrees; education leaving them pretty nearly as it found them, with this single difference, that it gives a fixed direction to their stupidity, a sort of incurable wry neck to the thing they call their understanding. ”
― Thomas Love Peacock, The Collected Works of Thomas Love Peacock: PergamonMedia

“You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.”
― Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

“I contrive to get through my day by sinking the morning in bed, and killing the evening in company; dressing and dining in the intermediate space, and stopping the chinks and crevices of the few vacant moments that remain with a little easy reading. And that amiable discontent and antisociality which you reprobate in our present drawing-room-table literature, I find, I do assure you, a very fine mental tonic, which reconciles me to my favourite pursuit of doing nothing, by showing me that nobody is worth doing any thing for.”
― Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

“I perceive , Sir , you are one of those who love an authority more than a reason”
― Thomas Love Peacock

“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

“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. In this wilful blight of her affections, she found them valueless as means: they had been the end to which she had immolated all her affections, and were now the only end that remained to her. She did not confess this to herself as a principle of action, but it operated through the medium of unconscious self-deception, and terminated in inveterate avarice. She laid on external things the blame of her mind's internal disorder, and thus became by degrees an accomplished scold.”
― Thomas Love Peacock

“Sit with your back to the lady and read Dante; only be sure to begin in the middle, and turn over three or four pages at once—backwards as well as forwards, and she will immediately perceive that you are desperately in love with her—desperately.”
― Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

“The next arrival was that of Mr Cranium, and his lovely daughter Miss Cephalis Cranium, who flew to the arms of her dear friend Caprioletta, with all that warmth of friendship which young ladies usually assume towards each other in the presence of young gentlemen.[”
― Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall

“Not drunk is he who from the floor
Can rise alone and still drink more;
But drunk is he who prostrate lies,
Without the power to drink or rise-T.L. Peacock”
― T.L. Peacock

“They had set an example of profligate contempt for truth, of which the success was in proportion to the effrontery, and when their prosperity had filled the market with competitors, they cried out against their own reflected sin, as if they had never committed it, or were entitled to a monopoly of it.”
― Thomas Love Peacock, Maid Marian and Crotchet Castle

“...what was in those days called social order, namely, the preservation of the privileges of the few who happened to have any, at the expense of the swinish multitude who happened to have none, except that of working and being shot at for the benefit of their betters:”
― Thomas Love Peacock, Maid Marian