Date: Licens'd Decemb. 22. 1691
"I burn and am consumed with hopeless Love; those Beams in whose soft temperate warmth I wanton'd heretofore, now flash destruction to my Soul, my Treacherous greedy Eyes have suck'd the glaring Light, they have united all its Rays, and, like a burning-Glass, Convey'd the pointed Meteor to-my Hea...
preview | full record— Congreve, William (1670-1729)
Date: May 10, 1704
"Now I would gladly be informed how it is possible to account for such imaginations as these in particular men, without recourse to my phenomenon of vapours ascending from the lower faculties to overshadow the brain, and there distilling into conceptions, for which the narrowness of our ...
preview | full record— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)
Date: 1708
"And then lastly, there are others, (represented by those Glasses, in our last comparison) in which the impressions of this Spirit are visible, and such we reckon all sorts of Animals. But then, as these smooth and polish'd Bodies which are of the same figure with the Sun [i.e. Spherical] do rece...
preview | full record— Ockley, Simon (bap. 1679, d. 1720)
Date: 1724
"[S]o with my Eyes open, and with my Conscience, as I may say, awake, I sinn'd, knowing it to be a Sin, but having no Power to resist; when this had thus made a Hole in my Heart, and I was come to such a height, as to transgress against the Light of my own Conscience, I was then fit for any Wicke...
preview | full record— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)
Date: 1766
"We talked of the pleasures of temperance, and of the sun-shine in the mind unpolluted with guilt."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
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: 1774, rev. 1787, 1779 in English
"A darkness spreads over my eyes; heaven and earth seem to dwell in my soul and absorb all its powers, like the idea of a beloved mistress."
preview | full record— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749-1832)
Date: 1854
"I ha' lookn at't an thowt o' thee, Rachael, till the muddle in my mind have cleared awa, above a bit, I hope."
preview | full record— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
Date: 1914
"A light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind."
preview | full record— Joyce, James (1882-1941)
Date: 1992
"But his mind was eclipsed by the shadow of his father's presence."
preview | full record— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)