Date: 1662, 1762
"Our soul is escaped even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler: the snare is broken, and we are delivered."
preview | full record— The Church of England
Date: 1766
Gallantry "suffers, sometimes, another passion to get before it; reason and interest, often, hold the bridle, and, make it give way to our situation, and, affairs."
preview | full record— Trusler, John (1735-1820)
Date: 1774
"Acquire an easiness and versatility of manners, as well as of mind; and, like the chameleon, take the hue of the company you are with."
preview | full record— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)
Date: 1777
"As it is the character of Genius to penetrate with a lynx's beam into unfathomable abysses and uncreated worlds, and to see what is not, so it is the property of good sense to distinguish perfectly, and judge accurately what really is."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1779, 1781
"When Horace says of Pindar, that he pours his violence and rapidity of verse, as a river swoln with rain rushes from the mountain; or of himself, that his genius wanders in quest of poetical decorations, as the bee wanders to collect honey; he, in either case, produces a simile; the mind is impr...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1779, 1781
"The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seld...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1779, 1781
"The good and evil of Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit; the mind sinks under them in passive helplessness, content with calm belief and humble adoration."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1790, 1794, 1795, 1818, 1827
"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind."
preview | full record— Blake, William (1757-1827)
Date: December 1790
"Not having leisure or patience to follow this desultory writer through all the devious tracks in which his fancy has started fresh game, I have confined my strictures, in a great measure, to the grand principles at which he has levelled many ingenious arguments in a very specious garb."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: December 1790
"The man has been changed into an artificial monster by the station in which he was born, and the consequent homage that benumbed his faculties like the torpedo’s touch."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)