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Thomas Love Peacock Quotes

1785–1866 England

Thomas Love Peacock (18 October 1785 – 23 January 1866) was an English novelist and poet. His conversational novels satirize the philosophical preoccupations of the Romantic era.

England
Essayists
Novelists
Playwrights
Poets

Random Thomas Love Peacock quote

18 quotes

Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond.

I never failed to convince an audience that the best thing they could do was to go away.

I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race.

The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.

Man yields to death; and man's sublimest works
Must yield at length to Time.

Clouds on clouds, in volumes driven,
Curtain round the vault of heaven.

Day is ended, Darkness shrouds
The shoreless seas and lowering clouds.

Rhododaphne (1818)

Time is lord of thee:
Thy wealth, thy glory, and thy name are his.

Time, the foe of man's dominion,
Wheels around in ceaseless flight,
Scattering from his hoary pinion
Shades of everlasting night.

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.

My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is, me judice [in my opinion], no book - it is a plaything.

Dreams, which, beneath the hov'ring shades of night,
Sport with the ever-restless minds of men,
Descend not from the gods. Each busy brain
Creates its own.

Death comes to all. His cold and sapless hand
Waves o'er the world, and beckons us away.
Who shall resist the summons?

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.

There are two reasons for drinking: one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it. The first is obvious, mechanical, and plebeian; the second is most refined, abstract, prospicient, and canonical.

In a bowl to sea went wise men three,
On a brilliant night in June:
They carried a net, and their hearts were set
On fishing up the moon.

The present is our own; but while we speak,
We cease from its possession, and resign
The stage we tread on, to another race,
As vain, and gay, and mortal as ourselves.

To chase the clouds of life's tempestuous hours,
To strew its short but weary way with flow'rs,
New hopes to raise, new feelings to impart,
And pour celestial balsam on the heart;
For this to man was lovely woman giv'n,
The last, best work, the noblest gift of Heav'n.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Love Peacock (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.