Date: Saturday, November 3, 1750
"When we have heated our zeal in a cause, and elated our confidence with success, we are naturally inclined to persue the same train of reasoning, to establish some collateral truth, to remove some adjacent difficulty, and to take in the whole comprehension of our system. As a prince in the ardou...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, March 12, 1751
"[T]hey therefore flattered his vanity, applauded his discoveries, and listened with submissive modesty to his lectures on the uncertainty of inclination, the weakness of resolves, and the instability of temper, to his account of the various motives which agitate the mind, and his ridicule of the...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: August 27, 1751
"In like manner the passions usurp the separate command of the successive periods of life."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: September 1, 1759.
"Employment is the great instrument of intellectual dominion."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: December 29, 1759
"If the senses were feasted with perpetual pleasure, they would always keep the mind in subjection."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1760-1761, 1762
"FORTUNE has made me the slave of another, but nature and inclination render me entirely subservient to you; a tyrant commands my body, but you are master of my heart."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1760-1761, 1762
"You would fondly persuade me that my former lessons still influence your conduct, and yet your mind seems not less enslaved than your body."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1774
"While awake, and in health, this busy principle [the imagination] cannot much delude us: it may build castles in the air, and raise a thousand phantoms before us; but we have every one of the senses alive, to bear testimony to its falsehood."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1774
"Reason, therefore, at once gives judgment upon the cause; and the vagrant intruder, imagination, is imprisoned, or banished from the mind."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1776
"he more approaching to the testimony of our senses every philosophical solution is, the more perhaps is it conformable to nature."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)