Date: 1700, 1705
"Wit is a Flux, a Looseness of the Brain, / And Sense-abstract has too much Pride to reign."
preview | full record— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)
Date: 1714
"Well then, I own my Heart has broke your Chains. / Patient I bore the painful Bondage long, / At length my generous Love disdains your Tyranny."
preview | full record— Rowe, Nicholas (1674-1718)
Date: Friday, November 6. 1724.
"Where this Passion is Real, It will be the Sovereign of the Mind. It moulds the Soul to its own Purposes; and lends its own Eyes to the Understanding."
preview | full record— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)
Date: 1727
Men's Reason "tyes them down to Rules," while women, "like Sampson break the trifling Twine and laugh at every Obstacle that would oppose [their] pleasure"
preview | full record— Davys, Mary (1674-1732)
Date: 1729
"Oh, let not the soft, penetrating plague / Creep on the freeborn mind! and working there, / With the sharp tooth of many a new-form'd want, / Endless, and idle all, eat out the heart / Of liberty; the high conception blast; / The noble sentiment, the impatient scorn / Of base subjection, and the...
preview | full record— Thomson, James (1700-1748)
Date: 1729
"E'en not all these, in one rich lot combined, / Can make the happy man, without the mind; / Where judgment sits clear-sighted, and surveys / The chain of reason with unerring gaze; / Where fancy lives, and to the brightening eyes, / His fairer scenes, and bolder figures rise; / Where social lov...
preview | full record— Thomson, James (1700-1748)
Date: 1704-5; 1731
"If a man's Body be under confinement, or he be impotent in his Limbs, he is then deprived of his bodily Liberty: And for the same Reason, if his Mind be blinded by sottish Errors, and his Reason over-ruled by violent Passions; is not This likewise plainly as great a Slavery and as ...
preview | full record— Clarke, Samuel (1675-1729)
Date: 1733-4
"So, cast and mingled with his very frame, / The mind's disease, its ruling passion came: / Each vital humour which should feed the whole, / Soon flows to this, in body and in soul."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1734
"And if it be said that the Understanding, which is but passive it self, like the bodily Eye, cannot be called the Leader of the rest of the Faculties; it must be granted, that (strictly speaking) it is rather the Light than the Guide: for if we consider it in the three Operations mention'd by th...
preview | full record— Forbes of Pitsligo, Alexander Forbes, Lord (1678-1762)
Date: January 1739
"The attention is on the stretch; the posture of the mind is uneasy; and the spirits being diverted from their natural course, are not governed in their movements by the same laws, at least not to the same degree, as when they flow in their usual channel."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)