Date: 1765
"If all [the mind] had was the mere capacity to receive those items of knowledge--a passive power to do so, as indeterminate as the power of wax to receive shapes or of a blank page to receive words--it would not be the source of necessary truths"
preview | full record— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)
Date: 1765
"I have also used the analogy of a veined block of marble, as opposed to an entirely homogenous block of marble, or to a blank tablet--what the philosophers call a tabula rasa"
preview | full record— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)
Date: 1788
"But in general, I know of no method of getting money, not even that of robbing for it upon the highway, which has so direct a tendency to efface the moral sense, to rob the heart of every gentle and humane disposition, and to harden it, like steel, against all impressions of sensibility."
preview | full record— Newton, John (1725-1807)
Date: 1791, 1800
"Then from the iron tablet of my mind, / Will I efface my catalogue of wrongs."
preview | full record— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)
Date: 1793
"She said she foresaw that, if his heart was not steel and adamant, he would be ruined; that she had read his mind thoroughly, and plainly saw that the only vice he had in the world was want of deceit."
preview | full record— Dibdin, Charles (bap. 1745, d. 1814)