Date: December 10, 1776; 1777
"The general objection which is made to philosophy's introduction into the regions of taste, is, that it checks and restrains the flights of the imagination, and gives that timidity which an over carefulness not to err or act contrary to reason is likely to produce."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: December 10, 1776; 1777
"In the midst of the highest flights of fancy or imagination, reason ought to preside from first to last, though I admit her more powerful operation is upon reflexion."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: 1777
"Parents may, perhaps, paint it to themselves: they may see (through the mirror of a sympathetic fancy) the poor widow receiving her child from the healing hand of the prophet--a child fresh blooming in the beauties of a second birth."
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)
Date: 1777
"In short, it appears that the mind in each sex has some natural kind of bias, which constitutes a distinction of character, and that the happiness of both depends, in a great measure, on the preservation and observance of this distinction."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1777
"Study, as it rescues the mind from an inordinate fondness for gaming, dress, and public amusements, is an oeconomical propensity; for a lady may read at much less expence than she can play at cards; as it requires some application, it gives the mind an habit of industry; as it is a relief agains...
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1777
"The philosophical doctrine of the slow recession of bodies from the sun, is a lively image of the reluctance with which we first abandon the light of virtue."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1777
"For it is in moral as in natural things, the motion in minds as well as bodies is accelerated by a nearer approach to the centre to which they are tending."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1777
"A woman, who possesses this quality, has received a most dangerous present, perhaps not less so than beauty itself: especially it it be not sheathed in a temper peculiarly inoffensive, chastised by a most correct judgment, and restrained by more prudence than falls to the common lot."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1777
"I will even go so far as to assert, that a young woman cannot have any real greatness of soul, or true elevation of principle, if she has not a tincture of what the vulgar would call Romance, but which persons of a certain way of thinking will discern to proceed from those fine feelings, and tha...
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1777
"The most pointed satire I remember to have read, on a mind enslaved by anger, is an observation of Seneca's."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)