Date: 1607
"If the happie Daemon of Vlisses direct not the wandering planet of my witte within the decent orbe of wisedome, my stammering pen seeming far ouergon with superfluitie of phrase, yet wanting matter I answer with the poet one only word inuerted."
preview | full record— Walkington, Thomas (b. c. 1575, d. 1621)
Date: 1710, 1734
"For example, the will is termed the motion of the soul: this infuses a belief, that the mind of man is as a ball in motion, impelled and determined by the objects of sense, as necessarily as that is by the stroke of a racket."
preview | full record— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)
Date: April 10, 1753
"The same contrariety of impulse may be perhaps discovered in the motions of men: we are formed for society, not for combination; we are equally unqualified to live in a close connection with our fellow beings, and in total separation from them: we are attracted towards each other by general symp...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1757
"Whatever turns the soul inward upon itself, tends to concenter forces, and to fit it for greater and stronger flights of science."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1777
"The philosophical doctrine of the slow recession of bodies from the sun, is a lively image of the reluctance with which we first abandon the light of virtue."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1777
"For it is in moral as in natural things, the motion in minds as well as bodies is accelerated by a nearer approach to the centre to which they are tending."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1777
"The vast conceptions which enable a true genius to ascend the sublimest heights, may be so connected with the stronger passions, as to give it a natural tendency to fly off from the strait line of regularity; till good sense, acting on the fancy, makes it gravitate powerfully towards that virtue...
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: October, 1784
"HUMAN thoughts are like the planetary system, where many are fixed, and many wander, and many continue for ever unintelligible; or rather like meteors, which generally lose their substance with their lustre."
preview | full record— Anonymous
Date: 1854
"The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of ideas; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneous activity; the voltaic-pile is not strong enough to produce crystallizations; phantasms of great ideas float through her mind, but she has not ...
preview | full record— Eliot, George (1819-1880)