Date: December 10, 1774; 1775
"The mind is but a barren soil; is a soil soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilised and enriched with foreign matter."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: 1774
"Hence Princes generally neglect nothing which may bring luxury into esteem: they recommend it by their example; they display every where pageantry and magnificence, and are the first to sow in the minds of their subjects those seeds of corruption."
preview | full record— Marat, Jean-Paul (1743-1793)
Date: 1775
Young thought is "spread" by "kindly cares"
preview | full record— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)
Date: 1775
"Vital airs" alone will not impart "health and vigour" to the soul
preview | full record— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)
Date: 1775
The opening heart is warmed byt "kindly cares"
preview | full record— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)
Date: 1775
Women, "like garden-trees," seldom show fruit, "till time has robbed them of the more specious blossom"
preview | full record— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)
Date: 1776-1789
"The ancient families of Rome had successively fallen beneath the tyranny of the Cæsars; and, whilst those princes were shackled by the forms of a commonwealth, and disappointed by the repeated failure of their posterity, it was impossible that any idea of hereditary succession should have ...
preview | full record— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)
Date: 1774-1776, 1788, 1803
"Well-skill'd / To form the growing soul, and on its young / And opening bud to fix the impression deep / Of every generous thought"
preview | full record— Downman, Hugh (1740-1809)
Date: 1778
"A thirst for knowledge, which can never be gratified, would not have been implanted; a mind which was to be chained to the earth, would never have been bent on the skies"
preview | full record— Caulfield (fl. 1778)
Date: 1779, 1781
"A memory admitting some things and rejecting others, an intellectual digestion that concocted the pulp of learning, but refused the husks, had the appearance of an instinctive elegance, of a particular provision made by Nature for literary politeness."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)