Date: September, 1781
"To think in this manner is to augment our existence, as instead of reckoning a third of our life mere waste, we habituate ourselves to attend to the result of our hours past in Sleep, and to recover out of the mass of thought produced during that period, very often amusement, and sometimes usefu...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: April, 1783
"Has he been at work all night without being conscious of it. Have other spirits been making impressions on his sensorium. Are there faculties in the mind quite separate one from another, which, like the eyes of Argus, may some of them be awake while others are asleep, and is the great faculty of...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1783
Some philosophers "think, that the brains of old men, grown callous by length of time, are, like hard wax, equally tenacious of old impressions, and unsusceptible of new."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1783
"The human brain is a bodily substance; and sensible and permanent impressions made upon it must so far resemble those made on sand by the foot, or on wax by the seal, as to have certain shape, length, breadth, and deepness"
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1785
"Aristotle taught, that all the objects of our thought enter at first by the senses; and, since the sense cannot receive external material objects themselves, it receives their species; that is, their images or forms, without the matter; as wax receives the form of the seal without any of the mat...
preview | full record— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)
Date: 1789
"They [African customs] had been implanted in me with great care, and made an impression on my mind, which time could not erase, and which all the adversity and variety of fortune I have since experienced served only to rivet and record; for, whether the love of one's country be real or imaginary...
preview | full record— Equiano, Olaudah [Gustavus Vasa] (c. 1745-1797)
Date: 1790
"There is no commonly honest man who does not more dread the inward disgrace of such an action, the indelible stain which it would for ever stamp upon his own mind, than the greatest external calamity which, without any fault of his own, could possibly befal him; and who does not inwardly feel th...
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: April, 1871
"Constantly impressed ideas are brought back by the world around us, and if they are so often, get so tied to our other ideas that we can hardly wrench them away."
preview | full record— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)
Date: 1923
"It stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can 'own' or 'dispose of' like the various objects of the external world."
preview | full record— Lukács, Georg [György] (1885-1971)
Date: July 31, 2017
"Character is like concrete: You can make an impression when it's freshly poured, in its youth, one could say, but when it sets, it's impervious to alteration."
preview | full record— Blow, Charles (b. 1970)