Date: January 19, 1791
"It is that new invented virtue, which your masters canonize, that led their moral hero constantly to exhaust the stores of his powerful rhetoric in the expression of universal benevolence; whilst his heart was incapable of harbouring one spark of common parental affection."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"He must have a heart of adamant who could hear a set of traitors puffed up with unexpected and undeserved power, obtained by an ignoble, unmanly, and perfidious rebellion, treating their honest fellow-citizens as rebels, because they refused to bind themselves, through their conscience, against ...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in pro...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"You know them but at a distance, on the statements of those who always flatter the reigning power, and who, amidst their representations of the grievances, inflame your minds against those who are oppressed. These are amongst the effects of unremitted labour, when men exhaust their attention, bu...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: December 10, 1790; 1791
"As a confirmation of its great excellence, and of the impression which it leaves on the minds of elegant spectators, our great Lyric Poet, when he conceived that sublime idea of the indignant Welch Bard, acknowledged that though many years had intervened, he had warmed his imagination with the r...
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: December 10, 1790; 1791
"But I am sure that mechanic excellence invigorated and emboldened his mind to carry Painting into the regions of Poetry, and to emulate that Art in its most adventurous flights."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: December 10, 1790; 1791
"The sublime in Painting, as in Poetry, so overpowers, and takes such a possession of the whole mind, that no room is left for attention to minute criticism."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: December 10, 1790; 1791
"It is an absurdity therefore to suppose we are born with this taste, though we are with the seeds of it, which by the heat and kindly influence of his genius, may be ripened in us."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: December 10, 1790; 1791
"When the Student has been habituated to this grand conception of the Art, when the relish for this stile is established, makes a part of himself, and is woven into his mind, he will, by this time, have got a power of selecting from whatever occurs in nature that is grand, and corresponds with th...
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)