Date: 1785
"Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind."
preview | full record— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)
Date: January 19, 1791
"But it is then, and basking in the sunshine of unmerited fortune, that low, sordid, ungenerous, and reptile souls swell with their hoarded poisons; it is then that they display their odious splendour, and shine out in full lustre of their native villainy and baseness."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"His blood they transfuse into their minds and into their manners."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: September 10, 1802
"A Poet's Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in Nature -- & not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similies."
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: November 10, 1813
"I by no means rank poetry or poets high in the scale of intellect. This may look like affectation, but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruptions prevents an earthquake."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1820
"When I meet with a proposition beyond finite comprehension, I abandon it as I do a weight which human strength cannot lift, and I think ignorance, in these cases, is truly the softest pillow on which I can lay my head."
preview | full record— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)
Date: August 16, 1820
"And is not this extraordina[r]y talk for the writer of Endymion? whose mind was like a pack of scattered cards--I am pick'd up and sorted to a pip."
preview | full record— Keats, John (1795-1821)
Date: December 27, 1823
"Now in filling my mind with them [ideas and facts], and in warming and animating me, you would, I doubt not, do me great good. And I am one of those substances, like sealing wax and other electric bodies, which require to be warmed in order to possess the faculty of attracting objects, of coveri...
preview | full record— Wilberforce, William (1759-1833)