text,updated_at,metaphor,created_at,context,theme,reviewed_on,dictionary,comments,provenance,id,work_id
"That frequently happens; and when once a false idea is impressed, it is very difficult to erase it, particularly at your age; as you are not yet capable of distinguishing the false from the true.
(Vol. I, page 86).",2013-06-14 04:25:41 UTC,"""That frequently happens; and when once a false idea is impressed, it is very difficult to erase it, particularly at your age; as you are not yet capable of distinguishing the false from the true.""",2010-07-16 22:09:32 UTC,"","",,Impressions and Writing,"","Contributed by PC Fleming, searching ""idea.""",17967,6749
"The situation of the places of our birth, the climate and temperature of the air, the circumstances of our parents, their humours and dispositions; but more especially their method of treating us in our infant years, I am persuaded give bias to our manners and actions, through the whole course of our lives. Our minds are like blank paper, as a great philosopher has observed, and the first impressions they receive are generally the most permanent and powerful. What is commonly and vulgarly called our natural temper is only what we acquire, after our births, from the example of those from whom we receive our institution, or upon whom we depend. And agreeable to this, the mild conduct of my parents, and the engaging tenderness of their behaviour to every body, certainly fixed that good humour and complacency in my soul, that no succeeding misfortune had ever the power to efface. My disposition, as the reader will have frequent occasion to observe, was serious, but not unpliant, was gentle, but not slavish. My countenance was open, and my spirit intrepid. But as my designs were not lost in the clouds of gaiety, so neither did they render my vain, conceited, and pedantic. [...]
(I.ii, p. 9-10)",2012-07-29 17:17:46 UTC,"""Our minds are like blank paper, as a great philosopher has observed, and the first impressions they receive are generally the most permanent and powerful.""",2012-07-29 17:02:57 UTC,"Volume I, Chapter ii",Blank Slate,,Writing,"","Reading Christopher Flint's The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2011), 81.",19906,7307
"This being a beautiful day, my spirits were cheered by the mere effect of climate. I had felt a return of spleen during my stay at Armidale, and had it not been that I had Dr Johnson to contemplate, I should have sunk into dejection; but his firmness supported me. I looked at him, as a man whose head is turning giddy at sea looks at a rock, or any fixed object. I wondered at his tranquillity. He said, 'Sir, when a man retires into an island, he is to turn his thoughts intirely to another world. He has done with this.' BOSWELL. 'It appears to me, sir, to be very difficult to unite a due attention to this world, and that which is to come; for, if we engage eagerly in the affairs of life, we are apt to be totally forgetful of a future state; and, on the other hand, a steady contemplation of the awful concerns of eternity renders all objects here so insignificant, as to make us indifferent and negligent about them.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, Dr Cheyne has laid down a rule to himself on this subject, which should be imprinted on every mind: ""To neglect nothing to secure my eternal peace, more than if I had been certified I should die within the day: nor to mind any thing that my secular obligations and duties demanded of me, less than if I had been ensured to live fifty years more.""'
(p. 245)",2013-06-26 18:54:50 UTC,"""Sir, Dr Cheyne has laid down a rule to himself on this subject, which should be imprinted on every mind: 'To neglect nothing to secure my eternal peace, more than if I had been certified I should die within the day: nor to mind any thing that my secular obligations and duties demanded of me, less than if I had been ensured to live fifty years more.'""",2013-06-26 18:54:50 UTC,"","",,Impressions and Writing,"",C-H Lion,21153,5657
"2. There is a second, which either is, or ought to be, deemed of importance, considered in a political light. I mean, the dreadful effects of this trade upon the minds of those who are engaged in it. There are, doubtless, exceptions; and I would, willingly, except myself. But in general, I know of no method of getting money, not even that of robbing for it upon the highway, which has so direct a tendency to efface the moral sense, to rob the heart of every gentle and humane disposition, and to harden it, like steel, against all impressions of sensibility.
(p. 9)",2014-01-11 15:28:23 UTC,"""But in general, I know of no method of getting money, not even that of robbing for it upon the highway, which has so direct a tendency to efface the moral sense, to rob the heart of every gentle and humane disposition, and to harden it, like steel, against all impressions of sensibility.""",2014-01-11 15:25:35 UTC,"","",,"Fetters, Impressions, and Writing","","Reading Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 131. Found again in Bohls and Duncan, Travel Writing, 1700-1830, pp. 191-2.",23328,7782