Date: 1759
"The different passions and appetites, the natural subjects of this ruling principle, but which are so apt to rebel against their master, he reduced to two different classes or orders."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1759
"The first consisted of those passions, which are founded in pride and resentment, or in what the schoolmen called the irascible part of the soul; ambition, animosity, the love of honour, and the dread of shame, the desire of victory, superiority, and revenge; all those passions, in short, which ...
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1759
"This order of passions, according to this system, was of a more generous and noble nature than the other. They were considered upon many occasions as the auxiliaries of reason, to check and restrain the inferior and brutal appetites. We are often angry at ourselves, it was observed, we often bec...
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1759
"The soft, the amiable, the gentle virtues, all the virtues of indulgent humanity are in comparison but little insisted upon, and seem on the contrary, by the Stoics in particular, to have been often regarded as meer weaknesses which it behoved a wise man not to harbour in his breast."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1759
"We are so nice in this respect that even a rape dishonours, and the innocence of the mind cannot, in our imagination, wash out the pollution of the body."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1759
"Dr. Hutcheson was so far from allowing self-love to be in any case a motive of virtuous actions, that even a regard to the pleasure of self-approbation, to the comfortable applause of our own consciences, according to him diminished the merit of a benevolent action."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1759
"The idea of that dreary and endless melancholy, which the fancy naturally ascribes to their condition, arises altogether from our joining to the change which has been produced upon them, our own consciousness of that change, from our putting ourselves in their situation, and from our lodging, if...
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1759, performed 1776
"(If shapes like his be but the fancy's coinage)"
preview | full record— Mason, William (1725-1797)
Date: 1759, performed 1776
"Steel then, ye Powers of heav'n, / Steel my firm soul with your own fortitude, / Free from alloy of passion."
preview | full record— Mason, William (1725-1797)
Date: 1759
"He might view his own temper and character with that sort of satisfaction with which we consider a well-contrived machine, in the one case; or with that sort of distaste and dissatisfaction with which we regard a very awkward and clumsy contrivance, in the other."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)