page 9 of 17     per page:
sorted by:

Date: 1766

"I know not whether the remark is to our honour or otherwise, that the lessons of wisdom have never such a power over us, as when they are wrought into the heart, through the ground-work of a story which engages the passions: Is it that we are like iron, and must first be heated before we can be ...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

preview | full record

Date: 1771

"The infant mind at coming to the world, is a meer rasa tabula, destitute of all ideas and materials of reflection."

— Usher, James (1720-1771)

preview | full record

Date: 1771

"It is a charte blanche, ready for receiving the inscriptions of sense; yet it behoves us carefully to observe, that it differs from a rasa tabula or a sheet of clean paper, in the following respect, that you may write on clean paper; that sugar is bitter, wormwood sweet, fire and f...

— Usher, James (1720-1771)

preview | full record

Date: 1774

"While awake, and in health, this busy principle [the imagination] cannot much delude us: it may build castles in the air, and raise a thousand phantoms before us; but we have every one of the senses alive, to bear testimony to its falsehood."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

preview | full record

Date: 1774

"Reason, therefore, at once gives judgment upon the cause; and the vagrant intruder, imagination, is imprisoned, or banished from the mind."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

preview | full record

Date: 1774

"Our eyes shew us that the prospect is not present; our hearing, and our touch, depose against its reality; and our taste and smelling are equally vigilant in detecting the impostor."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

preview | full record

Date: 1774

"But in sleep it is otherwise; having, as much as possible, put our senses from their duty, having closed the eyes from seeing, and the ears, taste, and smelling, from their peculiar functions, and having diminished even the touch itself, by all the arts of softness, the imagination is then left ...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

preview | full record

Date: 1774

"As in madness, the senses, from struggling with the imagination, are at length forced to submit, so, in sleep, they seem for a while soothed into the like submission: the smallest violence exerted upon any one of them, however, rouzes all the rest in their mutual defence; and the imagination, th...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

preview | full record

Date: 1775

"Our Author, who almost every where manifests a perfect knowledge in the anatomy of the human mind, proves his science more particularly in a passage of this Scene, by shewing a property in our natures which might have escaped any common dissecter of morals; and this is, our suffering, upon true ...

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

preview | full record

Date: 1775

"An evil conscience is a shrew, and gives most shocking curtain lectures."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

preview | full record

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.