Date: Friday, October 26, 1711
"A Man, they say, wears the Picture of his Mind in his Countenance; and one Man's Eyes are Spectacles to his who looks at him to read his Heart."
preview | full record— Steele, Sir Richard (1672-1729)
Date: 1731
"For as the Mind of God, which is the Archetypal Intellect, is that whereby he always actually comprehends himself, and his own Fecundity, or the Extent of his own Infinite Goodness and Power; that is, the Possibility of all things; So all Created Intellects being being certain Ectypal Models, or...
preview | full record— Cudworth, Ralph (1617-1688)
Date: 1744
"A mere existence or being is an indifferent thing, ('tis a Rasa Tabula) that may be coloured over with sin or holiness: and accordingly it receives its value from these; as a picture is esteemed not from the materials upon which it is drawn, but from the draught itself."
preview | full record— South, Robert (1634-1716)
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: 1782
"A letter is the soul's portrait. It is not a cold image, with its stagnation, so remote from love; it lends itself to all our emotions; turn by turn it grows animated, it enjoys, it rests"
preview | full record— Laclos, Pierre (-Ambrose-François) Choderlos de (1741-1803)
Date: 1792
"The understanding, it is true, may keep us from going out of drawing when we group our thoughts, or transcribe from the imagination and warm sketches of fancy; but the animal spirits, the individual character, give the colouring."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)