Date: 1754
"Our simple ideas fade in the mind, or fleet out of it, unless they are frequently renewed: and the most tenacious memory cannot maintain such as are very complex, without the greatest attention, and a constant care, nor always with both."
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1754
"This is the great intellectual province, wherein our minds range with much freedom, and often with exorbitant licence, in the pursuit of real or imaginary science."
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1754
"The mind would be little more than a channel through which ideas and notions glided from entity into nonentity."
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1754
"The scene of the mind, like a moving picture, must be governed with attention, that it may bring into our view the images we want, and as we want them. Otherwise ideas that are foreign to our actual train of thinking will frequently rush into our thoughts, and become objects of them whether we w...
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1754
"The idea I have, when this word is used, is always that of some particular white extension, or of several such whose ideas rush confusedly into the mind together."
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1754
"The words man or animal, raise in his mind no general idea; but in this case, as in the former, some particular idea of man, which the mind can frame without thinking of Alexander or Henry, rises there, and becomes representative of all men in general: or else several ideas of men, and other ani...
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1754
"Now the application of this corporeal image to what passes in the mind, or to the action of the mind when we meditate on various subjects, or on many distinct parts of the same subjects and when we communicate these thoughts to one another, sometimes with greater, and sometimes with less agitati...
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1758, 1781
"Hence then the Cause of all Defects is seen, / one wrong Movement spoils the whole Machine."
preview | full record— Hawkins, William (1721-1801)
Date: 1758, 1781
"Alas! All Souls are subject to like Fate, / All sympathizing with the Body's State; / Let the fierce Fever burn thro' ev'ry Vein, / And drive the madding Fury to the Brain, / Nought can the Fervour of his Frenzy cool, / But Aristotle's self's a Parish Fool!"
preview | full record— Hawkins, William (1721-1801)
Date: January 27, 1759.
"That it is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided, and to hide that from ourselves which must some time be found, is a truth which we all know, but which all neglect, and perhaps none more than the speculative reasoner, whose thoughts are always from home, whose eye wanders over life, whose ...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)