Date: 1744
"[T]he charming image of a city's brightest ornament" may be engraven on the heart by "the god of love ... in characters too indelible ever to be erased"
preview | full record— Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza (1693?-1756)
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: 1733, 1748
"Still let my faithful Memory impart, / And deep engrave it on my grateful heart, / How just, and good, and excellent Thou art."
preview | full record— Pilkington, Laetitia (c. 1709-1750)
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: 1782
"[A]cquainted ere you meet that you were to meet him no more, your heart would be all softness and grief, and at the very moment when tenderness should be banished from your intercourse, it would bear down all opposition of judgment, spirit, and dignity: you would hang upon every word, because ev...
preview | full record— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)
Date: 1789
"Ah! hide for ever from my sight / The faithless flatterer Hope--whose pencil, gay, / Portrays some vision of delight, / Then bids the fairy tablet fade away; / While in dire contrast, to mine eyes / Thy phantoms, yet more hideous, rise, / And Memory draws, from Pleasure's wither'd flower, / Corr...
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)