14 Quotes & Sayings By Thomas Love Peacock

Thomas Love Peacock (b. 1785; d. 1866) was an English poet, satirist, and critic. His works include the satirical novel Nightmare Abbey (1818), the novel The Keepsake (1822), and the humorous poem "Gaelic Melodies" (1825) Read more

His works are best known for their innovative use of language, often incorporating puns, neologisms, and allusions to classical mythology, literature, history, and popular culture.

1
On the top of Cadair Idris, I felt how happy a man might bewith a little money and a sane intellect, and reflected with astonishment and pityon the madness of the multitude. Thomas Love Peacock
I like the immaterial world. I like to live among...
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
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
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
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
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
7
Raven: The Reverend Mr Larynx has been called off on duty, to marry or bury (I don't know which) some unfortunate person or persons, at Claydyke:... Thomas Love Peacock
8
A mere wilderness, as you see, even now in December; but in summer a complete nursery of briers, a forest of thistles, a plantation of nettles, without any live stock but goats, that have eaten up all the bark of the trees. Here you see is the pedestal of a statue, with only half a leg and four toes remaining: there were many here once. When I was a boy, I used to sit every day on the shoulders of Hercules: what became of him I have never been able to ascertain. Neptune has been lying these seven years in the dust-hole; Atlas had his head knocked off to fit him for propping a shed; and only the day before yesterday we fished Bacchus out of the horse-pond. . Thomas Love Peacock
9
Raven: The Honourable Mr Listless is gone. He declared that, what with family quarrels in the morning, and ghosts at night, he could get neither sleep nor peace; and that the agitation was too much for his nerves: though Mr Glowry assured him that the ghost was only poor Crow walking in his sleep, and that the shroud and bloody turban were a sheet and a red nightcap. Thomas Love Peacock
10
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
11
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
12
My thoughts by night are often filled With visions false as fair: For in the past alone I build My castles in the air. Thomas Love Peacock
13
Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horse pond. Thomas Love Peacock