Date: September 10, 1802
"A Poet's Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in Nature -- & not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similies."
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1809
"Could my ideas flow as fast as the rain in the store-closet it would be charming."
preview | full record— Austen, Jane (1775-1817)
Date: November 10, 1813
"I by no means rank poetry or poets high in the scale of intellect. This may look like affectation, but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruptions prevents an earthquake."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1820
"And they [Stewart, Tracy, Cabanis] ask why may not the mode of action called thought, have been given to a material organ of peculiar structure, as that of magnetism is to the needle, or of elasticity to the spring by a particular manipulation of the steel."
preview | full record— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)
Date: 1820
"When I meet with a proposition beyond finite comprehension, I abandon it as I do a weight which human strength cannot lift, and I think ignorance, in these cases, is truly the softest pillow on which I can lay my head."
preview | full record— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)
Date: August 16, 1820
"And is not this extraordina[r]y talk for the writer of Endymion? whose mind was like a pack of scattered cards--I am pick'd up and sorted to a pip."
preview | full record— Keats, John (1795-1821)
Date: August 16, 1820
"My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk--you must explain my metapcs to yourself."
preview | full record— Keats, John (1795-1821)
Date: December 27, 1823
"Now in filling my mind with them [ideas and facts], and in warming and animating me, you would, I doubt not, do me great good. And I am one of those substances, like sealing wax and other electric bodies, which require to be warmed in order to possess the faculty of attracting objects, of coveri...
preview | full record— Wilberforce, William (1759-1833)
Date: January 8, 1824
"The string you touched in your last truly kind letter has been vibrating ever since, and making music most delightful to a parent's mental ear; an organ not commonly noticed, but which is full as much in daily exercise as the mind's eye of which we speak so familiarly."
preview | full record— Wilberforce, William (1759-1833)