Date: w. 1821, 1840
"At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force"
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sister...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1845
"Mr. Gore lived in St. Michael's, Talbot county, Maryland, when I left there; and if he is still alive, he very probably lives there now; and if so, he is now, as he was then, as highly esteemed and as much respected as though his guilty soul had not been stained with his brother's blood."
preview | full record— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)
Date: 1851
"Just as a spring, through the continual pressure of a foreign body, at last loses its elasticity, so does the mind if it has another person’s thoughts continually forced upon it."
preview | full record— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)
Date: 1854
"Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."
preview | full record— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Date: 1854
"What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many tho...
preview | full record— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Date: 1854
"While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?"
preview | full record— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Date: November 24, 1859
"A few naturalists, endowed with much flexibility of mind, and who have already begun to doubt on the immutability of species, may be influenced by this volume; but I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impa...
preview | full record— Darwin, Charles (1809-1882)