Date: c. 370-365 B.C.
"The reason why the souls exhibit this exceeding eagerness to behold the Plain of Truth is that pasturage is found there, which is suited to the highest part of the soul; and the wing on which the soul soars is nourished with this."
preview | full record— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
Date: c. 370-365 B.C.
"During this process the whole soul is all in a state of ebullition and effervescence,--which may be compared to the irritation and uneasiness in the gums at the time of cutting teeth,--bubbles up, and has a feeling of uneasiness and tickling; but when in like manner the soul is beginning to grow...
preview | full record— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
Date: 1596
"For as the sicke man, vvhen he seemes to sleepe and take his rest, is invvardly full of troubles: so the benummed and drousie conscience wants not his secret pangs and terrours; and when it shal be roused by the iudgement of God, it waxeth cruell and fierce like a wild beast."
preview | full record— Perkins, William (1558-1602)
Date: 1729
"Among the helluones librorum, the Cormorants of Books, there are wretched Reasoners, that have canine Appetites, and no Digestion."
preview | full record— Mandeville, Bernard (bap. 1670, d. 1733)
Date: 1748, 1777
"If they tell me, that they have mounted on the steps or by the gradual ascent of reason, and by drawing inferences from effects to causes, I still insist, that they have aided the ascent of reason by the wings of imagination; otherwise they could not thus change their manner of inference, and ar...
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1779, 1781
"When Horace says of Pindar, that he pours his violence and rapidity of verse, as a river swoln with rain rushes from the mountain; or of himself, that his genius wanders in quest of poetical decorations, as the bee wanders to collect honey; he, in either case, produces a simile; the mind is impr...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1796
"An ancient writer, Plutarch, I think it is, quotes some verses on the eloquence of Pericles, who is called "the only orator that left stings in the minds of his hearers." Like his, the eloquence of the declaration, not contradicting, but enforcing sentiments of the truest humanity, has left stin...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
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: 1851
"And so it happens that the person who reads a great deal—that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk."
preview | full record— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)
Date: 1883-1885
"The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman."
preview | full record— Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900)