Date: February 1792
"Whatever wisdom constituently is, it is like a seedless plant; it may be reared when it appears, but it cannot be voluntarily produced."
preview | full record— Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)
Date: 1793
"It is of great importance that this idea should be extirpated."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1799
Certain beliefs cannot be "outrooted" from the mind
preview | full record— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)
Date: 1800
"You see, though a man, I use your privilege, and prefer knitting yarn to threshing my brain with a book or the barn-floor with a flail"
preview | full record— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)
Date: 1800
"Mischievous passions" may be too "deeply rooted" in the heart to tear out
preview | full record— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)
Date: 1817
"My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above the ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness."
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1831
"We spurn at the bounds of time and space; nor would the thought be less futile that imagines to imprison the mind within the limits of the body, than the attempt of the booby clown who is said within a thick hedge to have plotted to shut in the flight of an eagle"
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1831
"There are a multitude of causes that will produce a miscarriage of this sort, where the richest soil, impregnated with the choicest seeds of learning and observation, shall entirely fail to present us with such a crop as might rationally have been anticipated"
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)