Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that the enjoyment derived from opium is not true happiness, but rather a momentary escape that carries serious consequences.
Thomas De Quincey's quote reflects on the heavy nature of opium's influence on a person's state of mind. While it may offer temporary pleasure, the joy it provides is overshadowed by the grave realities that accompany its use, suggesting that true laughter and happiness cannot stem from such fleeting and ultimately burdensome pleasures.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about addiction and its impacts on mental health.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was going to be a surgeon at one point, and I remember being taught that the surgical heroes aren't the ones that can staunch the bleeding; what you want is the surgeon that doesn't cause any bleeding in the first place.
A child in India grows up with the idea that you have to make choices that will create a better future. In fact, your whole life is a continuum of choices, so the more conscious you are, the greater your life will be.
At any moment, whatever we are experiencing, only one of two things is ever happening: either we are being with what is, or else we are resisting what is. Being with what is means letting ourselves have and feel our experience, just as it is right now. ... This is where genuine creativity, health, and communication, as well as spiritual power, arise from.
It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.
Has worrying about tomorrow every changed it?
Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
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