Date: 1790, 1794
"You, my dear friend, who have felt the tender attachments of love and friendship, and the painful anxieties which absence occasions, even amidst scenes of variety and pleasure; who understand the value at which tidings from those we love is computed in the arithmetic of the heart."
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
Date: 1790
"Such services, when weighed in the scale of reason, may prove rigorously just, but, in the balance of love, they will be found wanting. The head may understand the general theory of kindness, but the heart only can practise the detail; as the sculptor can give to marble an expression of human fe...
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
Date: 1790
"Alas! when an impassioned mind, wounded by indifference, attempts recrimination, it is like a naked and bleeding Indian attacking a man arrayed in complete armour, whose fortified bosom no stroke can penetrate, while every blow which indignant anguish rashly aims, recoils on the unguarded heart."
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
Date: 1790
"In vain we may lament the loss of our tranquillity; for peace, like the wandering dove, has forsaken its habitation in the bosom, and will return no more."
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
Date: March 8, 1790
"Your pow'r my captive heart in chains shall bind, / Sweet as the graces of your face and mind."
preview | full record— Kemble, John Philip (1757-1823)
Date: 1790
"The worst of these politics of revolution is this; they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1790
"But as these occasions may never arrive, the mind receives a gratuitous taint; and the moral sentiments suffer not a little, when no political purpose is served by their depravation."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: December 1790
"From the many just sentiments interspersed through the letter before me, and from the whole tendency of it, I should believe you to be a good, though a vain man, if some circumstances in your conduct did not render the inflexibility of your integrity doubtful; and for this vanity a knowledge of ...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: December 1790
"The passions are necessary auxiliaries of reason: a present impulse pushes us forward, and when we discover that the game did not deserve the chace, we find that we have gone over much ground, and not only gained many new ideas, but a habit of thinking."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: December 1790
"A few fundamental truths meet the first enquiry of reason, and appear as clear to an unwarped mind, as that air and bread are necessary to enable the body to fulfil its vital functions; but the opinions which men discuss with so much heat must be simplified and brought back to first principles; ...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)