“In fact, every intricate and untried path in life, where it was from the first a matter of arbitrary choice to enter upon it or avoid it, is effectually a path through a vast Hercynian forest, unexplored and unmapped, where each several turn in your advance leaves you open to new anticipations of that is next to be expected, and consequently open to altered valuations of all that has been already traversed. Even the character of your own absolute experience, past and gone, which (if any thing in this world) you might surely answer for as sealed and settled for ever - even this you must submit to hold in suspense, as a thing conditional and contingent upon what is yet come - liable to have its provisional character affirmed or reversed, according to the new combinations into which it may enter with elements only yet perhaps in the earliest stages of development.”
Quote by Thomas de Quincey
Work
Confessions of an English Opium Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar
Browse quotes and source details for this work. more
Author
You May Also Like
Source: The Cat's Table
Source: Foxglove
Source: Dirty Lying Dragons
Source: Dirty Lying Dragons
“Into the future one dares not look.”
Source: Images of War
“Fate was not an easy mistress to walk away from. She was always there, waiting, biding her time.”
Source: The Witch and the Tsar
Source: The Passenger
