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)
Date: 1792
"For any kind of reading, I think better than leaving a blank still blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1793
"Such is the natural imbecility of the human mind, it confines us to the immediate scenes in which we are engaged, and as new objects present the past is in a degree erased from recollection."
preview | full record— Anonymous [By an American Lady]
Date: 1794
"Therefore I take the mind or soul of men to be so perfectly indifferent to receive all impressions, as a rasa tabula, or white paper, &c."
preview | full record— Morell, Thomas (1703-1784)
Date: 1794
"The mind is not a rasa tabula, though, at the same time, it must be allowed, we gain no actual knowledge of the latent ideas which it possesses, but as they are awakened by reflection and experience."
preview | full record— Sullivan, Richard Joseph, Sir (1752-1806)
Date: 1794
"The rasa tabula will not allow us to have mental ideas."
preview | full record— Sullivan, Richard Joseph, Sir (1752-1806)
Date: 1795
"A soft sponginess of character that will easily acquire any hue, or any stain; a tabula rasa of intellect; a spirit invulnerable to insult; that (for example) after vain endeavors to disunite and discourage the Catholics of Ireland, could condescend to [end page 2] truck and chaffer, for the off...
preview | full record— Drennan, William (1754-1820)
Date: 1795
"The infant mind has been compared to a tabula rasa, or sheet of clean paper: but there is this essential difference, as hath been well observed, between the opposite objects of comparison they are not both equally Indifferent to the inscription which they are to bear."
preview | full record— Napleton, John (1738/9-1817)
Date: w. 1788-93, 1796 (rev. 1815, 1827, 1837, 1897)
"The action of the pen will doubtless imprint an idea on the mind as well as on the paper: but I much question whether the benefits of this laborious method are adequate to the waste of time; and I must agree with Dr. Johnson, (Idler, No. 74.) 'that what is twice read, is commonly better remember...
preview | full record— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)
Date: 1796
"Edgar, touched by a comparison to the person he most honoured, gratefully looked his acknowledgment; and all displeasure at her flight, even from Thomson's scene of conjugal felicity, was erased from his mind."
preview | full record— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)