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: 1727
"It is without Doubt, that Fancy and Imagination form a world of Apparitions in the Minds of Men and Women; (for we must not exclude the Ladies in this Part, whatever we do) and People go away as thoroughly possess'd with the Reality of having seen the Devil, as if they convers'd Face to Face wit...
preview | full record— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)
Date: 1737
"Whatever fancy paints, invention pours, / Judgment digests, the well tuned bosom feels, / Truth natural, moral, or divine, has taught, / The virtues dictate, or the Muses sing."
preview | full record— Thomson, James (1700-1748)
Date: 1737
"You see 'tis with weak heads as with weak stomachs, they immediately throw out what they received last; and what they read floats upon the surface of their mind, like oil upon water, without incorporating."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: January 1739
"Since the imagination, therefore, in running from low to high, finds an opposition in its internal qualities and principles, and since the soul, when elevated with joy and courage, in a manner seeks opposition, and throws itself with alacrity into any scene of thought or action where its courage...
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
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)
Date: 1742
"But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air, / Soon close; where pass'd the shaft, no trace is found. / As from the wing no scar the sky retains, / The parted wave no furrow from the keel, / So dies in human hearts the thought of death."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1746, 1793
"Yet, could'st thou in that dreadful hour, / On my rack'd soul all Lethe pour, / Or fan me with the gelid breeze, / That chains in ice th' indignant seas."
preview | full record— Blacklock, Thomas (1721-1791)
Date: 1748, 1749
"Such is the chaos, such the rapid and continual succession of our ideas; they drive one another successively, as one wave impels another; so that it the imagination does not employ a part of its muscles, poised as it were in an equilibrium upon the strings of the brain, so as to sustain itself s...
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: Tuesday, January 22, 1751
"It is, perhaps, not impossible to promote the cure of this mental malady, by close application to some new study, which may pour in fresh ideas, and keep curiosity in perpetual motion."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)