Date: w. 1821, 1840
"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind o...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
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: 1854
"Then we shall have that marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of human happiness."
preview | full record— Eliot, George (1819-1880)
Date: 1854
"The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of ideas; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneous activity; the voltaic-pile is not strong enough to produce crystallizations; phantasms of great ideas float through her mind, but she has not ...
preview | full record— Eliot, George (1819-1880)
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)