Date: 1741
"A few useful Things perhaps, mixed and confounded with many Trifles and all manner of Rubbish fill up their Memories, and compose their intellectual Possessions. 'Tis a great Happiness therefore to distinguish things aright, and to lay up nothing in the Memory but what has some just Value in it,...
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1741
"Whatsoever Improvements arise to the Mind of Man from the wise Exercise of his own reasoning Powers, these may be called his proper Manufactures; and whatsoever he borrows from Abroad these may be termed his foreign Treasures: both together make a wealthy and happy Mind."
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1744
"What wealth in Intellect, that sovereign power, / Which Sense and Fancy summons to the bar; / Interrogates, approves, or reprehends; / And from the mass those underlings import, / From their materials sifted, and refined, / And in Truth's balance accurately weigh'd, / Forms art and science, gove...
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1748, 1754
"The sensible Beauty, or Good, is refined from its Dross by partaking of the Moral, and the Moral receives a Stamp, a visible Character and Currency from the Sensible."
preview | full record— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)
Date: 1754
"All these are Reason's Treasures, Stores of Thought; / Reflection's unexhausted Funds, replete / With Matter for her own delightful Task."
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)
Date: 1754
"But yet so difficult is the intellectual commerce, so narrow the intellectual fund, that the wisest men are frequently obliged to employ their money like counters, and their counters like money, in one case, however, without loss, in the other without fraud. We may be said to do the first, that ...
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1759
"That is, let not great Examples, or Authorities, browbeat thy Reason into too great a diffidence of thyself: Thyself so reverence as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad; such borrowed riches make us poor."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1762
"The pleasure of a train of ideas, is the most remarkable in a reverie; especially where the imagination interposes, and is active in coining new ideas, which is done with wonderful facility."
preview | full record— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)
Date: 1767, 1778
Science may "bid the soul her own rich funds employ, / Increase her treasures, and her wealth enjoy."
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)
Date: 1785
"To apply his great mind to minute particulars, is wrong: it is like taking an immense balance, such as is kept on quays for weighing cargoes of ships, to weigh a guinea. I knew I had neat little scales, which would do better; and that his attention to every thing which falls in his way, and his ...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)