Date: 1741
"When the Attention is strongly fixed to any particular Subject, all that is said concerning it makes a deeper impression upon the Mind."
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1741
"There are are some Persons who complain they cannot remember divine or human Discourses which they hear, when in Truth their Thoughts are wandering half the Time, or they hear with such coldness and Indifferency and a trifling Temper of Spirit, that it is no wonder the Things which are read or s...
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1741
"Sloth, Indolence and idleness will no more bless the Mind with intellectual Riches, than it will fill the Hand with Gain, the Field with Corn, or the Purse with Treasure."
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1741
"I Might give another plain Simile to confirm the Truth of this [mnemonic method]. What Horse or Carriage can take up and bear away all the various, rude and unweildy Loppings of a branchy Tree at once? But if they are divided yet further so as to be laid close, and bound up in a more uniform Man...
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1741
"Therefore it is that the Rules of Grammar, and useful Examples of the Variation of Words, and the peculiar Forms of Speech in any Language, are so often appointed by the Master as lessons for the Scholars to be frequently repeated; and they are contracted into Tables for frequent Review, that wh...
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1741
"Maronides had got the first hundred Lines of Virgil's 'Æneis' printed upon his Memory so perfectly, that he knew not only the Order and Number of every Verse from one to a hundred in Perfection, but the Order and Number of every Word in each Verse also."
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1741
"It is also by this Association of Ideas that we may better imprint any new Idea upon the Memory by joining with it some Circumstance of the Time, Place, Company, &c. wherein we first observed, heard or learnt it."
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1741
"Let every thing we desire to remember be fairly and distinctly written and divided into Periods, with large Characters in the Beginning; for by this Means we shall the more readily imprint the Matter and Words on our Minds, and recollect them with a Glance, the more remarkable the Writi...
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1744
"I will endeavour in the following Dissection of our Puppet Heroe, to convince my dear Country Men and Country Women, that they are madly following an Ignis fatuus, or Will of the Whisp, which they take for real substantial Light, and which I ...
preview | full record— Garrick, David (1717-1779)
Date: 1744
"I shall, having now crack'd the Shell of my Spleen against the Town, come to the Kernel of Reason, and present 'em this little sweet Nut of theirs, worm-eaten to the Sight, imbitter'd to their Taste, and abhorr'd to their Imaginations, as Shakespear terms it."
preview | full record— Garrick, David (1717-1779)