Date: 1762
"The world we inhabit is replete with things not less remarkable for their variety than their number. These, unfolded by the wonderful mechanism of external sense, furnish the mind with many perceptions, which, joined with ideas of memory, of imagination, and of reflection, form a complete train ...
preview | full record— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)
Date: April, 1783
"And we must be content to rest upon the surface without straining to pierce into causes which are hidden from us, and which have hitherto mocked the attempts of impatient philosophers. We should resolve to wait till a longer fathom line is granted us, and then we shall be able to sound depths wh...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1785
"He [Johnson] said, he did not grudge Burke's being the first man in the House of Commons, for he was the first man every where; but he grudged that a fellow who makes no figure in company, and has a mind as narrow as the neck of a vinegar cruet, should make a figure in the House of Commons, mere...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1791
"I cannot allow any fragment whatever that floats in my memory concerning the great subject of this work to be lost."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1817
"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: February, 1821
"This is the only true ideal--the heavenly tints of Fancy reflected in the bubbles that float upon the spring-tide of human life."
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)
Date: August 31, 1837
"The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon."
preview | full record— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)