Date: 1604
"For, as the Ratte running behinde a paynted cloth, betrayeth her selfe; even so, a Passion lurking in the heart, by thoughts and speech discovereth it selfe, according to the common Proverbe, ex abundantia cordis os loquitur, from the aboundance of heart, the tongue speaketh: for as a Riv...
preview | full record— Wright, Thomas (c. 1561-1623)
Date: 1691
"But alas, I had not been sixty minutes Alphabetizing and sorting of Books before my old Rambling Maggot began to crawl and bite afresh; upon which I immediately grew as fickle and wavering as if I had drank Liquor distill'd from a Womans Brains; and nothing would satisfie me now till I saw the S...
preview | full record— Dunton, John (1659–1732)
Date: 1696
"He that strives not to Stem his Angers Tide, / Does a Mad Horse without a Bridle ride."
preview | full record— Cibber, Colley (1671-1757)
Date: 1708
"Passions are too hurrying to last; Vapours that start from a Mercurial Brain, whose wild Chimera's flush the lighter Faculties, which tir'd i'th' vain pursuit of fancy'd Pleasures."
preview | full record— Baker, Thomas (b. 1680-1)
Date: 1727
"These abandon'd him to the Fury of an enrag'd Conscience, open'd the Sluices of the Soul, as I call them, and pour'd in a Flood of unsufferable Grief, letting loose those wild Beasts call'd Passions upon him, such as Rage, Anguish, Self-reproach, too late Repentance, and final Desperation, all t...
preview | full record— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)
Date: 1742
"But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air, / Soon close; where pass'd the shaft, no trace is found. / As from the wing no scar the sky retains, / The parted wave no furrow from the keel, / So dies in human hearts the thought of death."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1790, 1794, 1795, 1818, 1827
"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind."
preview | full record— Blake, William (1757-1827)
Date: August 1817
"There is no natural harmony in the ordinary combinations of significant sounds: the language of prose is not the language of music, or of passion: and it is to supply this inherent defect in the mechanism of language--to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo ...
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)
Date: 1820
"And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the win...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1824
"'I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, / Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, / And suddenly my brain became as sand / 'Where the first wave had more than half erased / The track of deer on desert Labrador; / Whilst the wolf, from which they fled amazed, / 'Leaves his stamp visibly u...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)