Date: 1790, 1794, 1795, 1818, 1827
"The cistern contains: the fountain overflows / One thought, fills immensity."
preview | full record— Blake, William (1757-1827)
Date: 1790
"All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1790
"All your sophisters cannot produce any thing better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1790
"But if, in the moment of riot, and in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembick of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our nakedness by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1790
"Some charitable dole is wanting to these, our often very unhappy brethren, to fill the gloomy void which reigns in minds which have nothing on earth to hope or fear."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1791
"As in filling a vessel drop by dy drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over. "
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: January 19, 1791
"But it is then, and basking in the sunshine of unmerited fortune, that low, sordid, ungenerous, and reptile souls swell with their hoarded poisons; it is then that they display their odious splendour, and shine out in full lustre of their native villainy and baseness."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: December 10, 1790; 1791
"The sublime in Painting, as in Poetry, so overpowers, and takes such a possession of the whole mind, that no room is left for attention to minute criticism."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: 1791
"Johnson was much attached to London: he observed, that a man stored his mind better there, than any where else; and that in remote situations a man's body might be feasted, but his mind was starved, and his faculties apt to degenerate, from want of exercise and competition."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1791
"This is a strong confirmation of the truth of a remark of his, which I have had occasion to quote elsewhere 5, that 'a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it;' for, notwithstanding his constitutional indolence, his depression of spirits, and his labour in carrying on hi...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)