Date: 1699
"We do plainly perceive that our Bodies are clogs to our Minds: And all the use that even the purest sort of Body in an Estate conceived to be glorified, can be of to a Mind, is to be an Instrument of local Motion, or to be a repository of Ideas for Memory and Imagination."
preview | full record— Burnet, Gilbert (1643-1715)
Date: 1734
"But what shall we think of this odd Treasury, which retains things during a certain time, and then loses them, even before the Infirmities of Age come on? We say a thing has dropt out of our head: (where does it drop?) and it drops in again when we least expect it. What Corners do those Images l...
preview | full record— Forbes of Pitsligo, Alexander Forbes, Lord (1678-1762)
Date: 1748, 1777
"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas, furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1767
"Others however are more remote, and lie far beyond the reach of ordinary faculties; coming only within the verge of those few persons, whose minds are capacious enough to contain that prodigious croud of ideas, which an extensive observation and experience supply; whose understandings are penetr...
preview | full record— Duff, William (1732-1815)
Date: 1785
"He [Johnson] said, he did not grudge Burke's being the first man in the House of Commons, for he was the first man every where; but he grudged that a fellow who makes no figure in company, and has a mind as narrow as the neck of a vinegar cruet, should make a figure in the House of Commons, mere...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1785
"I have often experienced, that scenes through which a man has passed, improve by lying in the memory: they grow mellow."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1791
"Every page of the Rambler shews a mind teeming with classical allusion and poetical imagery."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1887
"A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it."
preview | full record— Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)