Date: 1791
"Dr. Goldsmith once said to Dr. Johnson, that he wished for some additional members to the LITERARY CLUB, to give it an agreeable variety; for (said he) there can now be nothing new among us: we have travelled over one another's minds."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1793
Corporal punishment closes all "wholsome avenues of mind ... and on every side we see them guarded with a train of disgraceful passions, hatred, revenge, despotism, cruelty, hypocrisy, conspiracy and cowardice."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1793
"Milton had perhaps wandered in the fields of fancy, and consoled his blindness with listening to the voice of his nation, that was to have resounded with his name."
preview | full record— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)
Date: November 19, 1793
"The mind, freed from her weighty companion, roams at large through the regions of fancy; and at once conceives and invents, beautifies and illustrates, amplifies and adorns."
preview | full record— Boyd, Hugh (1746-1794)
Date: 1798
"On the contrary, if, to entice him to enter the paths of knowledge, we strew them with flowers, how will he feel when he must force his way through thorns and briars?"
preview | full record— Edgeworth, Maria
Date: w. c. 1800, 1805
"These sudden eruptions of the passions of the multitude, spread, like the lava of a volcano, throughout all France, nor could men of correct judgment, who aimed only at reform of abuses, and a renovation in all the departments, check the fury of the torrent."
preview | full record— Warren, Mercy Otis (1728-1814)
Date: 1830
"To grasp intelligence as this night-like mine or pit in which is stored a world of infinitely many images and representations, yet without being in consciousness, is from the one point of view the universal postulate which bids us treat the notion as concrete, in the way we treat, for example, t...
preview | full record— Hegel, G. W. F. (1770-1831)
Date: 1848
"It is often obscure, often half-told; for he who wrote it, in his clear seeing of the things beneath, may have been impatient of detailed interpretations; for if we choose to dwell upon it and trace it, it will lead us always securely back to that metropolis of the soul’s dominion from which we ...
preview | full record— Ruskin, John (1819-1900)
Date: 1850
"The relation discovered, must be something remote from all the common tracks and sheep-walks made in the mind."
preview | full record— Smith, Sydney (1771-1845)
Date: 1854
"Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."
preview | full record— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)