Date: March, 1778
"What that power is by which the conscious spirit governs and directs various mental faculties, is, it must be confessed, utterly inexplicable as long as our souls are enclosed in material frames. While a watch is shut up in its case, we cannot see how the operations of its curious machinery are ...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: March, 1778
"And my similitude between a watch in its case, and the soul in its material frame, will, I persuade myself, be agreeable to all my readers, whose dispositions are mild, and like better to be pleased with what they read, than to attack it."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1779
"Let me exhort ye then to open the locks of your hearts with the nail of repentance: burst asunder the fetters of your beloved lusts, mount the chimney of hope, take from hence the bar of good resolution, break through the stone wall of despair, and all the strong holds in the dark entry of the v...
preview | full record— Anonymous
Date: 1779, 1781
"The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapours of incipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason, without eclipsing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Addison seems to have been deterred from prosecuting his own design."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1779, 1781
"The man that sits down to suppose himself charged with treason or peculation, and heats his mind to an elaborate purgation of his character from crimes which he was never within the possibility of committing, differs only by the infrequency of his folly from him who praises beauty which he never...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1779, 1781
"His strength always appears in his agility; his volatility is not the flutter of a light, but the bound of an elastick mind."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1779, 1781
"The heat of Milton's mind might be said to sublimate his learning, to throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1779, 1781
"An accumulation of knowledge impregnated his mind, fermented by study and exalted by imagination."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1780
"The face is certainly the best index of the mind, and the passions as forcibly expressed by the features as by the words and gesture of the performer."
preview | full record— Francklin, Thomas (1721–1784); Lucian (b.c. 125, d. after 180)
Date: 1780
"The mind, in my opinion, of every well-disposed man, is like a soft mark, or butt; many are the archers in this life, with their quivers full of speeches of every kind; but few amongst them aim aright: some stretch the cord too tight, and the arrow, sent forth with more force than is necessary, ...
preview | full record— Francklin, Thomas (1721–1784); Lucian (b.c. 125, d. after 180)