Date: 1768
"Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw--and 'tis thou who lifts him up to Heaven--eternal fountain of our feelings!--'tis here I trace thee--and this is thy divinity which stirs within...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1768
"The old man rose up to meet me, and with a respectful cordiality would have me sit down at the table; my heart was sat down the moment I enter'd the room; so I sat down at once like a son of the family."
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1769
One may gain "absolute empire over the mind" of another
preview | full record— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)
Date: 1769
"[T]he generosity of the Dairo, instead of exciting the least emotion of gratitude in Taycho's own breast, acted only as a golden key to unlock all the sluices of his virulence and abuse."
preview | full record— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)
Date: 1769
"After a weak mind has been duly prepared, and turned as it were, by opening a sluice or torrent of high-sounding words, the greater the contradiction proposed the stronger impression it makes, because it increases the puzzle, and lays fast hold on the admiration; depositing the small proportion ...
preview | full record— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)
Date: 1769
"He knew when to distract its weak brain with a tumult of incongruous and contradictory ideas: he knew when to overwhelm its feeble faculty of thinking, by pouring in a torrent of words without any ideas annexed. These throng in like city-milliners to a Mile-end assembly, while it happens to be u...
preview | full record— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)
Date: 1769
"I can assure thee, Peacock, that Richard was a prince of a very agreeable aspect, and excelled in every personal accomplishment; neither was his heart a stranger to the softer passions of tenderness and pity"
preview | full record— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)
Date: 1769
"The first reverend sage who delivered himself on this mysterious subject, having stroked his grey beard, and hemmed thrice with great solemnity, declared that the soul was an animal; a second pronounced it to be the number three, or proportion; a third contended for the number seven, or harmony;...
preview | full record— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)
Date: 1769
"Pox on their philosophy! Instead of demonstrating the immortality of the soul, they have plainly proved the soul is a chimæra, a will o' the wisp, a bubble, a term, a word, a nothing!"
preview | full record— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)
Date: 1769
"Do you think it possible, Lucy, for a Frenchwoman to love? is not vanity the ruling passion of their hearts?"
preview | full record— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)