Date: 1700
"Reason, 'tis true, shou'd over Sense Preside, / Correct our Notions, and our Judgment Guide; / But false Opinions, rooted in the Mind, / Hoodwink the Soul, and keep our Reason Blind."
preview | full record— Pomfret, John (1667-1702)
Date: 1743
"When Sorrow wounds the breast, as ploughs the glebe, / And hearts obdurate feel her softening shower; / Her seed celestial, then, glad Wisdom sows; / Her golden harvest triumphs in the soil."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1743
"I'll range the plenteous intellectual field; / And gather every thought of sovereign power, / To chase the moral maladies of man; / Thoughts which may bear transplanting to the skies, / Though natives of this coarse penurious soil; / Nor wholly wither there, where seraphs sing, / Refined, exalte...
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"Hitherto the stores, / Which feed thy mind and exercise her powers, / Partake the relish of their native soil, / Their parent earth."
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: Tuesday, February 12, 1751
"There are many diseases both of the body and mind, which it is far easier to prevent than to cure, and therefore I hope you will think me employed in an office not useless either to learning or virtue, if I describe the symptoms of an intellectual malady, which, though at first it seizes only th...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1773
Toil and danger "feed and ripen minds" (not "meats and drinks" or "balmy airs, and vernal suns and showers")
preview | full record— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)
Date: 1779, 1781
"A memory admitting some things and rejecting others, an intellectual digestion that concocted the pulp of learning, but refused the husks, had the appearance of an instinctive elegance, of a particular provision made by Nature for literary politeness."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: w. September 1794, 1797
"Wit, that no suffering could impair, / Was thine, and thine whose mental powers / Of force to chase the fiends that tear / From Fancy's hands her budding flowers."
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)
Date: 1799
"And, indeed, there is so much truth in the remark, that till women shall be more reasonably educated, and till the native growth of their mind shall cease to be stinted and cramped, we have no juster ground for pronouncing that their understanding has already reached its highest attainable point...
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)