Nightmare Abbey Quotes

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“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

“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

“Mr Flosky suddenly stopped: he found himself unintentionally trespassing within the limits of common sense.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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