Date: 1786
"'Solitude,' added he one day, 'is dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue: pleasures of some sort are necessary to the intellectual as to the corporeal health; and those who resist gaiety will be likely for the most part to fall a sacrifice to appetite; for the solicitations of s...
preview | full record— Piozzi, [née Salusbury; other married name Thrale] Hester Lynch (1741-1821)
Date: December 1790
"The man has been changed into an artificial monster by the station in which he was born, and the consequent homage that benumbed his faculties like the torpedo’s touch."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: December 1790
"The mewing babe in swaddling-clothes, who is treated like a superior being, may perchance become a gentleman; but nature must have given him uncommon faculties if, when pleasure hangs on every bough, he has sufficient fortitude either to exercise his mind or body in order to acquire personal mer...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: December 1790
"The exercise of our faculties is the great end, though not the goal we had in view when we started with such eagerness."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: December 1790
"The vulgar have not the power of emptying their mind of the only ideas they imbibed whilst their hands were employed; they cannot quickly turn from one kind of life to another."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: December 1790
"A few fundamental truths meet the first enquiry of reason, and appear as clear to an unwarped mind, as that air and bread are necessary to enable the body to fulfil its vital functions; but the opinions which men discuss with so much heat must be simplified and brought back to first principles; ...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: December 1790
"Perhaps the most improving exercise of the mind, confining the argument to the enlargement of the understanding, is the restless enquiries that hover on the boundary, or stretch over the dark abyss of uncertainty."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1792
"Yet disappointed as we are, in our researches, the mind gains strength by the exercise, sufficient, perhaps, to comprehend the answers which, in another step of existence, it may receive to the anxious questions it asked, when the understanding with feeble wing was fluttering round the visible e...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1792
"Yet, when I exclaim against novels, I mean when contrasted with those works which exercise the understanding and regulate the imagination."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1793
"If, with the 'mind's eye,' she had a taste to travel through distant kingdoms and take a retrospective view of past events, she might nourish that fondness for variety so predominant with human nature, and in the indulgence of this disposition be happy."
preview | full record— Anonymous [By an American Lady]