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Date: April, 1783
"Let an Hypochondriack then have his park well stocked. Let him get as many agreeable ideas into his mind as he can; and though there may in wintery days seem: a total vacancy, yet when summer glows benignant, and the time of singing of birds is come, he will be delighted with gay colours and enc...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: April, 1783
"How is it that ideas ripen in the mind, so that a man shall go to bed with a very imperfect possession of what he has laboured to get by heart, and shall awake in the morning able to repeat it with distinctness and facility?"
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: April, 1783
"Has he been at work all night without being conscious of it. Have other spirits been making impressions on his sensorium. Are there faculties in the mind quite separate one from another, which, like the eyes of Argus, may some of them be awake while others are asleep, and is the great faculty of...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: April, 1783
"What are we doing while we are endeavouring to recollect an idea which we have forgotten? What faculty is then exerted? How is it exerted? Nothing can be more wildly mysterious. A learned and ingenious physician gave me a very pretty similitude as a slight explanation of it. Said he 'You are lik...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: April, 1783
"Shakespeare makes Macbeth solemnly but hopelessly ask the physician if he has any remedy to wear out direful traces from the brain."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1785
"He [Johnson] said, he did not grudge Burke's being the first man in the House of Commons, for he was the first man every where; but he grudged that a fellow who makes no figure in company, and has a mind as narrow as the neck of a vinegar cruet, should make a figure in the House of Commons, mere...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1785
"I doubted that he would not be willing to come down from his elevated state of philosophical dignity; from a superiority of wisdom among the wise, and of learning among the learned; and from flashing his wit upon minds bright enough to reflect it."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1785
"His mind was so full of imagery, that he might have been perpetually a poet."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1785
"He had a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, and gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking: yet, though grave and awful in his deportment, when he thought it necessary or proper, he frequently indulged himself in pleasantry and sportive s...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1785
"BOSWELL. 'But, sir,'tis like walking up and down a hill; one man will naturally do the one better than the other. A hare will run up a hill best, from her fore-legs being short; a dog down.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, sir; that is from mechanical powers. If you make mind mechanical, you may argue in that ma...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
