Date: 1777
"Great allowances must be made for a profusion of gaiety, loquacity, and even indiscretion in children, that there may be animation enough left to supply an active and useful character, when the first fermentation of the youthful passions is over, and the redundant spirits shall come to subside."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1777
"If I may be allowed to change the allusion so soon, I would say, that the passions also resemble fires, which are friendly and beneficial when under proper direction, but if suffered to blaze without restraint, they carry devastation along with them, and, if totally extinguished, leave the benig...
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1777
"For I never will believe that envy, though passed through all the moral strainers, can be refined into a virtuous emulation, or lying improved into an agreeable turn for innocent invention."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1777
"Almost all the other passions may be made to take an amiable hue; but these two must either be totally extirpated, or be always contented to preserve their original deformity, and to wear their native black."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1777
"Good sense is a judicious mechanic, who can produce beauty and convenience out of suitable means; but Genius (I speak with reverence of the immeasurable distance) bears some remote resemblance to the divine architect, who produced perfection of beauty without any visible materials, 'who spake, a...
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
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: 1777
"The minds of the negroes are contracted; because slavery destroys all the springs of the soul."
preview | full record— Raynal, Guillaume Thomas (1713-1796)
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)