Date: Tuesday, March 10, 1752
"It is not sufficient to maintain the first vigour; for excellence loses its effect upon the mind by custom, as light after a time ceases to dazzle."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1755
"That it will immediately become popular I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders, and risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and harden ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last prevail, and...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1759
"He compared reason to the sun, of which the light is constant, uniform, and lasting; and fancy to a meteor, of bright but transitory lustre, irregular in its motion, and delusive in its direction."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1760-1761, 1762
"His boasted reason seems only to light him astray, and brutal instinct more regularly points out the path to happiness."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1760-1761, 1762
"Where, I again repeat it, is human reason! not only some men, but whole nations, seem divested of its illumination."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1760-1761, 1762
"Reason cannot resolve. It lends a ray to shew the horrors of my prison, but not a light to guide me to escape them."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1766
"We talked of the pleasures of temperance, and of the sun-shine in the mind unpolluted with guilt."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1770
"But all his serious thoughts had rest in Heaven. / As some tall cliff, that lifts its awful form, / Swells from the vale and midway leaves the storm, / Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, / Eternal sunshine settles on its head."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: September, 1770
"This double feeling is of various kinds and various degrees; some minds receiving a colour from the objects around them, like the effects of the sun beams playing thro' a prism; and others, like the cameleon, having no colours of their own, take just the colours of what chances to be nearest them."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: April, 1778
"Cicero, upon whose mind the advancing rays of celestial philosophy beamed with a brightness very admirable in a Pagan period of time, before the Sun of Righteousness arose, and shone forth in full splendour upon the world, informs us, in his Tusculan Questions, of a very remarkable interview bet...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)