Date: 1793
"The most palpable of all classes of knowledge is that I am, personally considered, but an atom in the ocean of mind."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1794
"As those which contribute to circulate the blood, and to perform the various secretions; as well as the associate tribes and trains of ideas, which contribute to furnish the perpetual streams of our dreaming imaginations."
preview | full record— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)
Date: 1797
"Dwell upon this affecting scene, till it has excited your pity; and this pity, while it melts the mind to Christian love, shall insensibly produce a temper of habitual sympathy and softness."
preview | full record— Wilberforce, William (1759-1833)
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: 1810, 1820
"Though slow to entertain thoughts of love, as soon as he perceives the partiality of his ward, it enters his breast like a torrent when the flood-gates are opened."
preview | full record— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)
Date: 1817
"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: August 1817
"Whenever any object takes such a hold on the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in love, or kindling it to a sentiment of admiration;--whenever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, ...
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)
Date: August 1817
"There is no natural harmony in the ordinary combinations of significant sounds: the language of prose is not the language of music, or of passion: and it is to supply this inherent defect in the mechanism of language--to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo ...
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)
Date: 1819
"He who saves me from this conclusion, who makes a mock of this doctrine, and sets at nought its power, is to me not less than the God of my idolatry, for he has left one drop of comfort in my soul."
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)
Date: February, 1821
"This is the only true ideal--the heavenly tints of Fancy reflected in the bubbles that float upon the spring-tide of human life."
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)