Thomas Love Peacock

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“But still my fancy wanders freeThrough that which might have been.”