Date: September 10, 1836
"The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat."
preview | full record— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
Date: September 10, 1836
"These are examples of Reason’s momentary grasp of the sceptre; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power."
preview | full record— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
Date: August 31, 1837
"And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, -- this he shall hear and promulgate."
preview | full record— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1842
Rash, angry words may be "spoken out of season / When passion has usurp'd the throne of reason"
preview | full record— Frere, John Hookham (1769-1846)
Date: September, 1843
"In Germany, everything is forcibly suppressed; a real anarchy of the mind, the reign of stupidity itself, prevails there, and Zurich obeys orders from Berlin."
preview | full record— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)
Date: 1848
"It is often obscure, often half-told; for he who wrote it, in his clear seeing of the things beneath, may have been impatient of detailed interpretations; for if we choose to dwell upon it and trace it, it will lead us always securely back to that metropolis of the soul’s dominion from which we ...
preview | full record— Ruskin, John (1819-1900)
Date: 1850
"But Nature then was sovereign in my mind, / And mighty forms, seizing a youthful fancy, / Had given a charter to irregular hopes."
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)