Date: 1704
"You boast, indeed, of being obliged to no other Creature, but of drawing, and spinning out all from your self; That is to say, if we may judge of the Liquor in the Vessel by what issues out, You possess a good plentiful Store of Dirt and Poison in your Breast; And, tho' I would by no means, less...
preview | full record— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)
Date: Saturday, May 7, to Tuesday, May 10, 1709
"When we first take our place about a man, the receptacles of the pericranium are immediately searched. In his, I found no one ordinary trace of thinking; but strong passion, violent desires, and a continued series of different changes, had torn it to pieces."
preview | full record— Steele, Sir Richard (1672-1729)
Date: Wednesday, August 1, 1711
"Thou art a Person of a light Mind; thy Drum is a Type of thee, it soundeth because it is empty."
preview | full record— Steele, Sir Richard (1672-1729)
Date: September 10, 1726
"To explain this, we must consider that the first Image which an outward Object imprints on our Brain is very slight; it resembles a thin Vapour which dwindles into nothing, without leaving the least track after it. But if the same Object successively offers itself several times, the Image it occ...
preview | full record— Arbuckle, James (d. 1742)
Date: September 17, 1726
"I Need not expatiate upon other Characters; for I have too good an Opinion of your Readers, to doubt of their beginning now to be sensible that most Men speak and act but from a fortuitous Concourse of Images, or a Train of them stored up in the Brain."
preview | full record— Arbuckle, James (d. 1742)
Date: 1732
"Trace it to the fountain-head, and you shall not find that you had it by any of your senses, the only true means of discovering what is real and substantial in nature: you will find it lying amongst other old lumber in some obscure corner of the imagination, the proper receptacle of visions, fan...
preview | full record— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)
Date: 1754
"All these are Reason's Treasures, Stores of Thought; / Reflection's unexhausted Funds, replete / With Matter for her own delightful Task."
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)
Date: 1760
"Whenever this shall be executed, it is to be looked upon as the work of true genius; but when fallen short of, as often happens, it is to be deemed the impotent effort of the hard-bound brains of low plagiaries, whose memory is filled with the shreds and ill-chosen scraps of other mens wit."
preview | full record— Macklin, Charles (1697-1797)
Date: 1760-7
"But the heat gradually increasing, and in a few seconds more getting beyond the point of all sober pleasure, and then advancing with all speed into the regions of pain,--the soul of Phutatorius, together with all his ideas, his thoughts, his attention, his imagination, judgment, resolution, deli...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1763, 1767
"The guardian genius of his dawning thought, / Who wide disclos'd to wisdom's sacred ray / The eager inlets of his ample mind, / And pour'd upon each opening mental cell, / The virtue-forming scientific beam / With letter'd and religious radiance fill'd, / The fair expanses of his princely soul, ...
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)