no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension … - Thomas De Quincey

Nevertheless, I have a very reprehensible way of heating at times in the midst of my own misery: and, unless when I am checked by some powerful feelings, I am afraid I shall be guilty of this indecent practice even in these annals of suffering or enjoyment

how easily a man who has never been in any great distress, may pass through life without knowing, in his own person at least, anything of the possible goodness of the human heart - or, as I must add with a sigh, of its possible vileness. So a thick curtain of manners is drawn over the features and expression of men's natures, that to the ordinary observer, the two extremities, and the infinite field of varieties which lie between them, are all confounded - the vast and multitudinous line of differences expressed in the gamut or alphabet of elementary sounds.

All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in it velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite...Upon a night of earthquake he builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow of an infant he raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious vintages that could not else have been.