Date: 1765
"If all [the mind] had was the mere capacity to receive those items of knowledge--a passive power to do so, as indeterminate as the power of wax to receive shapes or of a blank page to receive words--it would not be the source of necessary truths"
preview | full record— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)
Date: 1768
"Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your passions, tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them?"
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: December 10, 1774; 1775
"He will pick up from dunghills what by a nice chymistry, passing through his own mind, shall be converted into pure gold; and, under the rudeness of Gothic essays, he will find original, rational, and even sublime inventions."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: w. 1755, 1777
"She [Nature] employs it [spiritual substance] as a kind of paste or clay; modifies it into a variety of forms and existences; dissolves after a time each modification, and from its substance erects a new form."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1780
"My Potter stamp on me thy clay, Thy only stamp of love!"
preview | full record— Wesley, John (1703-1791)
Date: 1782
The Muse, like Cato, "Well [...] supplies her want of softer art / By all the sterling treasures of the heart."
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: 1786
"For, as the state of heat, in metallic substances, is the state wherein they are made capable to assume new or beautiful forms, so the state of affliction is the state to mould the human mind to every pursuit that is congenial to the dignity of its nature."
preview | full record— Nolan, William (fl. 1786)
Date: 1786, 1787, 1788; 1789
"So poignant a mind in a vulgariz'd shell,/ Resembles a bucket of gold in a well; / 'Tis like Ceylon's best spice in a rude-fashion'd jar, / Or Comedy coop'd in a Dutch man of war."
preview | full record— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)
Date: 1789
"A different store his richer freight imparts-- / The gem of virtue, and the gold of hearts; / The social sense, the feelings of mankind, / And the large treasure of a godlike mind!"
preview | full record— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)