Date: 1747-8
"Because a woman's heart may be at one time adamant, at another wax."
preview | full record— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)
Date: 1752
"His Mind was formed of those firm Materials, of which Nature formerly hammered out the Stoic, and upon which the Sorrows of no Man living could make an Impression. "
preview | full record— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)
Date: 1761
"Did not your master Plato maintain, that all the art of man, that all philosophy could not extract from the human mind what nature had not implanted there; as all the operations in chemistry are incapable of extracting from any mixture more gold than is already contained in it?"
preview | full record— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778); Kenrick, William (1729/30-1779)
Date: 1768
"Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your passions, tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them?"
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1794, 1797
"If you have reduced me to the necessity of again debating the same painful and gloomy question, if you cannot give that elasticity to my mind which will animate it to despise difficulty and steel it against injustice, however good your intentions may have been, I fear you have but imposed misery...
preview | full record— Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809)
Date: 1796
"The climate's heat, 'tis well known, operates with no small influence upon the constitutions of the Spanish ladies: but the most abandoned would have thought it an easier task to inspire with passion the marble statue of St. Francis than the cold and rigid heart of the immaculate Ambrosio."
preview | full record— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)