Date: 1783
"And the impression that such things [overlong parodies], when long continued, leave on the mind, is by no means desirable."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1783
"For the passions and imagination mutually affect each other; and the same rules will serve for the government of both."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1783
"The fruits of Sobriety are health, gladness, governable passions, clear discernment, rectitude of opinion, the esteem of others, and long life; which, with an approving conscience, are the greatest blessings here below, and, in all common cases, an effectual security against a diseased imaginati...
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1783
"I should not do justice to my subject, if I did not recommend moderate application to the studious in general, and to those of them chiefly whose fancy has become ungovernable from a depression of mind."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1783
"I shall only remark, that too much study will in time shatter the strongest nerves, and make the soul a prey to melancholy. "
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1783
"The want of air and exercise, with interrupted digestion, unhinges the bodily frame: and the mind, long and violently exerted in one direction, like a bow long bent, loses its elasticity, and, unable to recover itself, remains stupidly fixed in the same distorted posture"
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1783
"If thoughts could occupy space, we might be tempted to think, that we had laid them up in certain cells or repositories, to remain there till we had occasion for them."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1783
"To account for this, and other phenomena of Memory, by intermediate causes, many authors, both antient and modern, were fain to suppose, that every thing perceived by us, whether a thought of the mind, or an external object, every thing, in a word, that we remember, makes upon the brain a certai...
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1783
"When the brain itself is disordered, by disease, by drunkenness, or by other accidents, these philosophers are of opinion, that the impressions are disfigured, or instantly erased, or not at all received; in which case, there is either no remembrance, or a confused one."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1783
Some philosophers "think, that the brains of old men, grown callous by length of time, are, like hard wax, equally tenacious of old impressions, and unsusceptible of new."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)