I stood checked for a moment - awe, not fear, fell upon me - and whist I stood, a solemn wind began to blow, the most mournful that ever ear heard. Mournful! That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a profound moment of awe in the face of mortality and the passage of time.
In this quote, Thomas De Quincey describes a moment of deep reflection where he is overcome not by fear, but by a sense of reverence and awe as he experiences a melancholic wind. This wind symbolizes the enduring nature of mortality and the weight of centuries of existence, inviting the listener to contemplate the impact of time on life and the feelings of loss and nostalgia that accompany such reflections.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of cherishing life.
But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.
The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.
Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.
Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o'clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.
Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!
Flowers that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their coloring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children - honored as the jewelry of God.
Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature- whichever is convenient.
The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.
A bigot is a person who makes an idol of his commitments.
An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery
I am the infinite sea, and all worlds are but grains of sand upon my shore.
I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
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