Opium Quotes - Page 3

• When you’re in love, your brain secretes endorphins into your blood. Organic morphine leaks out of a gland in your skull, feels like a low-grade opium rush. Some people confuse the two, the head rush and the love. You think you’re in love with a person, but you’re in love with a syringe.

  Craig Clevenger

  Love You, Thinking, Two

  Craig Clevenger (2005). “The Contortionist's Handbook”

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• The President of the United States thinks that for the Japanese opium is more dangerous than war.

  Townsend Harris

  War, Thinking, President

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• We were like confirmed opium-eaters: in our moments of reason we well knew the deadly nature of our pursuit, but we certainly were not prepared to abandon its terrible delights.

  H. Rider Haggard

  Delight, Moments, Reason

  H. Rider Haggard (2013). “Delphi Works of H. Rider Haggard (Illustrated)”, p.1158, Delphi Classics

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• Words like passion and ecstasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try to turn them over, find out what's on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell os a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Love, War, Passion

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• The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

  Sebastian Faulks

  Pain, Difficulty, Unimaginable

  Sebastian Faulks (2007). “Engleby: A Novel”, Doubleday Books

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• You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor his flagging spirits by opium or wine, his work will characterize itself as the effect of opium or wine. If you make a picture or a statue, it sets the beholder in that state of mind you had when you made it. If you spend for show, on building, or gardening, or on pictures, or on equipages, it will so appear. We are all physiognomists and penetrators of character, and things themselves are detective.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wine, Character, Artist

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II”, p.434

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• Religion is the opium of the people translated from the German Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkessometimes misquoted as opiate of the people.

  Karl Marx

  People, Religion, Opiates

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• The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

  Julio Cortazar

  Book, Drug, Quality

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• Religious distress is at the same time the expression of the real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of the spiritless condition. It is the opium of the people.

  Karl Marx

  Religious, Real, Heart

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1975). “Collected works”

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• Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Art, Morality, Action

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• The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against traditional religion as the "opium of the masses"—cannot hear the music of the spheres.

  Albert Einstein

  Atheist, Struggle, Feelings

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• I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions.

  Charles Bukowski

  Funny, Powerful, Mean

  Charles Bukowski (2003). “Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993”

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• It is the bourgeoisie which has turned religion into an opium of the people by preaching a God, lord of the heavens only, while taking possession of the earth for itself.

  Frei Betto

  People, Heaven, Bourgeoisie

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• You know," Gabriel said, "there was a time I thought we could be friends, Will." "There was a time I thought I was a ferret," Will said, "but that turned out to be the opium haze. Did you know it had that effect? Because I didn't.

  Cassandra Clare

  Ferrets, Gabriel, Haze

  Cassandra Clare (2013). “The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel; Clockwork Prince; Clockwork Princess”, p.257, Simon and Schuster

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• We don't look at each other anymore. Not really. Not since I pulled him from that opium den. Now when I look at him, I see the addict. And when he looks at me, he sees what he would rather not remember. I wish I could be his adored little girl again, sitting at his side.

  Libba Bray

  Girl, Wish, Looks

  Libba Bray (2010). “The Sweet Far Thing”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

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• Opium is the only drug to' be rely'd on-all the boasted nostrums only take up time, and as the disease [is] often of short duration, or of small quantity, they have gain'd credit which they do not deserve.

  Erasmus Darwin

  Drug, Credit, Disease

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• It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.

  Simone Weil

  People, Revolution

  Simone Weil (2013). “The Notebooks of Simone Weil”, p.596, Routledge

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• If you make a treaty first with the United States and settle the matter of the opium trade, England cannot change this, though she should desire to do so.

  Townsend Harris

  Desire, Firsts, England

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• The very same British and American families who had combined to wreck the Indian textile industry in the promotion of the opium trade [...] combined to make the trade, a valuable source of revenue. In 1864 they joined forces to create causes for war and to promote the terrible War Between the States, also known as the American Civil War.

  John Coleman

  War, Textiles, Wrecks

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• Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God.

  John Updike

  Rainbow, Trying, Christianity

  John Updike (2011). “Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf”, p.73, Random House

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• The President wishes the Japanese to be very prudent about the introduction of opium, and if a treaty is made, he wishes that opium may be strictly prohibited.

  Townsend Harris

  Wish, President, May

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• How was life before Pop-Tarts, Prozac and padded playgrounds? They ate strudel, took opium and played on the grass.

  Jennifer Michael Hecht

  Grass, Prozac, Pops

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• Alcoholism, the opium habit and tobaccoism are a trio of poison habits which have been weighty handicaps to human progress during the last three centuries. In the United States, the subtle spell of opium has been broken by restrictive legislation; the grip of the rum demon has been loosened by the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution, but the tobacco habit still maintains its strangle-hold and more than one hundred million victims of tobaccoism daily burn incense to the smoke god.

  John Harvey Kellogg

  Science, Broken, Progress

  John Harvey Kellogg (1922). “Tobaccoism;: Or, How Tobacco Kills,”

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• Lettuce, greens and celery, though much eaten, are worse than cabbage, being equally indigestible without the addition of condiments. Besides, the lettuce contains narcotic properties. It is said of Galen, that he used to obtain from a head of it, eaten on going to bed, all the good effects of a dose of opium.

  William Alcott

  Bed, Cabbage, Used

  William Andrus Alcott (1838). “The Young House-keeper: Or, Thoughts on Food and Cookery”, p.191

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• What came before has dissolved from me, lost like milk teeth. But I think, rather, that it has always been as it is, and there was never a beforethis nor will there be an afternow. I am accepting. This is not a thing to be solved, or conquered, or destroyed. It is. I am. We are. We conjugate together in darkness, plotting against each other, the Labyrinth to eat me and I to eat it, each to swallow the hard, black opium of the other. We hold orange petals beneath our tongues and seethe. It has always been so. It grinds against me and I bite into its skin.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Thinking, Orange, Darkness

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