Date: 1817
"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1818
"It is strictly the language of the imagination; and the imagination is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety of shapes and combinations of power."
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)
Date: 1819
"If he was arbitrary and a tyrant, first, France as a country was in a state of military blockade, on garrison-duty, and not to be defended by mere paper bullets of the brain; secondly, but chief, he was not, nor he could not become, a tyrant by right divine."
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)
Date: 1819
"He is styed in his prejudices -- he wallows in the mire of his senses -- he cannot get beyond the trough of his sordid appetites, whether it is of gold or wood."
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)
Date: February, 1821
"This is the only true ideal--the heavenly tints of Fancy reflected in the bubbles that float upon the spring-tide of human life."
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)
Date: November 1824
"Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored ...
preview | full record— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800-1859)
Date: 1831
"By the mind we understand that within us which feels and thinks, the seat of sensation and reason"
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1831
In poetry we are "privileged occasionally to cast away the slough and exuviæ of the body from incumbering and dishonouring us, even as Ulysses passed over his threshold, stripped of the rags that had obscured him, while Minerva enlarged his frame, and gave loftiness to his stature, a...
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1831
Teaching in a crowded school is "like the undertaking, related by Livy, of Accius Navius, the augur, to cut a whetstone with a razor ... the sharpness of human faculties, is so blunted and destroyed"
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1831
"The sublimest poet that ever sung, was peradventure, while a stripling, unconscious of the treasures which formed a part of the fabric of his mind, and unsuspicious of the high destiny that in the sequel awaited him."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)