Date: 1770
"A metaphysician, exploring the recesses of the human heart, hath just such a chance for finding the truth, as a man with microscopic eyes would have, for, finding the road."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: September, 1770
"This double feeling is of various kinds and various degrees; some minds receiving a colour from the objects around them, like the effects of the sun beams playing thro' a prism; and others, like the cameleon, having no colours of their own, take just the colours of what chances to be nearest them."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1772
"The Eye, that Orb of Light, which shews / The Features of the Mind, / Distinct, as faithful Mirrours yield / The Forms of human Kind."
preview | full record— Whyte, Samuel (1733-1811)
Date: 1774
"A learned parson, rusting in his cell, at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well upon the nature of man; will profoundly analyze the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the senses, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what; and yet, unfortunately, h...
preview | full record— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)
Date: 1781
"The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1785
"The shifts and turns, / The expedients and inventions multiform / To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms / Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win,-- / To arrest the fleeting images that fill / The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast, / And force them sit, till he has pencil'd off / ...
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1785
"Modern Philosophers, as well as the Peripatetics and Epicureans of old, have conceived, that external objects cannot be the immediate objects of our thought; that there must be some image of them in the mind itself, in which, as in a mirror, they are seen."
preview | full record— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)
Date: 1790
"And o'er Imagination's gloomy glass, / Despair's mute sons like Banquo's visions pass"
preview | full record— Merry, Robert (1755-1798)
Date: 1796
"No drug, nor juice of all the acid tribe, / Can move the Tints, which Glassy Pores imbibe; / So no mean prejudice, no bribes, nor art, / Efface th' Impressions of an Upright Heart."
preview | full record— Bishop, Samuel (1731-1795)