Date: 360 B.C.
"For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself."
preview | full record— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
Date: March 24, 1659
"[Oliver Cromwell's] temper exceeding fiery, as I have known, but the flame of it kept down, for the most part, or soon allayed with those moral endowments he had."
preview | full record— Maidston, John
Date: 1708, 1714
"For otherwise, the Pannick may have been caught; the Evidence of the Senses lost, as in a Dream; and the Imagination so inflam'd, as in a moment to have burnt up every Particle of Judgment and Reason. The combustible Matters lie prepar'd within, and ready to take fire at a Spark; but chiefly in ...
preview | full record— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)
Date: 1774
"I expect the incomparable fair one of Hamburg, that prodigy of beauty, and paragon of good sense, who has enslaved your mind, and inflamed your heart."
preview | full record— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)
Date: 1774
"As you found your brain considerably affected by the cold, you were very prudent not to turn it to poetry in that situation; and not less judicious in declining the borrowed aid of a stove, whose fumigation, instead of inspiration, would at best have produced what Mr. Pope calls a souterkin<...
preview | full record— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)
Date: 1782
"I read it carefully a second time--pondered--weighed--and submitted--whenever a spark of vanity seems to be glowing at my heart--I will read your letter--and what then?"
preview | full record— Sancho, Charles Ignatius (1729-1780)
Date: 1782
"Earth re-possesses part of what she gave--and the freed spirit mounts on wings of fire;--her disorder was a stoppage--she fell ill the evening of the Friday that I last saw her continued in her full senses to the last."
preview | full record— Sancho, Charles Ignatius (1729-1780)
Date: January 19, 1791
"It is that new invented virtue, which your masters canonize, that led their moral hero constantly to exhaust the stores of his powerful rhetoric in the expression of universal benevolence; whilst his heart was incapable of harbouring one spark of common parental affection."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"You know them but at a distance, on the statements of those who always flatter the reigning power, and who, amidst their representations of the grievances, inflame your minds against those who are oppressed. These are amongst the effects of unremitted labour, when men exhaust their attention, bu...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1796
"Cold as ice themselves, they never could kindle in our breasts a spark of that zeal, which is necessary to a conflict with an adverse zeal; much less were they made to infuse into our minds that stubborn persevering spirit, which alone is capable of bearing up against those vicissitudes of fortu...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)