Date: Saturday, April 14, 1750
"Such, therefore, is the importance of keeping reason a constant guard over imagination, that we have otherwise no security for our own virtue, but may corrupt our hearts in the most recluse solitude, with more pernicious and tyrannical appetites and wishes than the commerce of the world will gen...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1754
"Our simple ideas, and even our complex ideas, and notions return sometimes of themselves, we know not why, nor how, mechanically, as it were, uncalled by the mind, and often to the disturbance of it in the pursuit of other ideas, to which these intruders are foreign."
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1754
"Intellect, the artificer, works lamely without his proper instrument, sense; which is the case when he works on moral ideas."
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1755
"Ideas of the same race, though not exactly alike, are sometimes so little different, that no words can express the dissimilitude, though the mind easily perceives it, when they are exhibited together; and sometimes there is such a confusion of acceptations, that discernment is wearied, and disti...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1760-1761, 1762
"Reason guides the bands of either host, nor can it subdue one passion but by the assistance of another."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1766-1769, 1956
"Formerly my mind was quite a lodging-house for all ideas who chose to put up there, so that it was at the mercy of accident, for I had no fixed mind of my own. Now my mind is a house where, though the street rooms and the upper floors are open to strangers, yet there is always a settled family i...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1766-1769, 1956
"Only this more. The ideas--my lodgers--are of all sorts. Some, gentlemen of the law, who pay me a great deal more than others. Divines of all sorts have been with me, and have ever disturbed me. When I first took up house, Presbyterian ministers used to make me melancholy with dreary tones. Meth...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1766-1769, 1956
"This family! this landlord, let me say, or this landlady, as the mind and the soul are both she. I shall confuse myself with metaphor. Let me then have done with it."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1774
"Reason, therefore, at once gives judgment upon the cause; and the vagrant intruder, imagination, is imprisoned, or banished from the mind."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
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."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)