Date: 1748, 1749
"'Tis thus the brain, that matrix, if I may use the expression, of the soul, is perverted after its manner, together with that of the body."
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: 1748, 1749
"The mind has, as well as the body, its epidemical and scorbutic disorders."
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: 1748, 1749
"By its flattering pencil the cold skeleton of abstract reason assumes living and vermillion flesh; but it the sciences flourish, arts are embellished, woods speak, echoes sigh, rocks weep, marble breathes, and all the inanimate bodies are suddenly inspired with life."
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: 1748, 1749
"Besides what would the very best school avail without a matrix perfectly open for the entrance, or conception of ideas? It is as impossible to give a single idea or notion to a man, deprived of his senses, as it is to get a woman with child, to whom nature in a hurry has denied a womb; as I once...
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: 1748, 1749
"Such is the chaos, such the rapid and continual succession of our ideas; they drive one another successively, as one wave impels another; so that it the imagination does not employ a part of its muscles, poised as it were in an equilibrium upon the strings of the brain, so as to sustain itself s...
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: 1748, 1749
"'Tis this which is the source of all our sentiments, of all our pleasures, passions, and thoughts; for the brain has its proper muscles for thinking, as well as the legs have theirs for walking."
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: Tuesday, June 12, 1750
"But timidity is a disease of the mind more obstinate and fatal; for a man once persuaded that any impediment is insuperable, has given it, with respect to himself, that strength and weight which it had not before."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: August 13, 1750
"Beings conscious of a frame of mind originally diseased, as all the human race has cause to be, must use the regimen of a stricter self- government."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, August 28, 1750
"The passions are diseases indeed, but they necessarily direct us to their proper cure."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Saturday, September 15, 1750
"But this medicine of the mind is like many remedies applied to the body, of which, though we see the effects, we are unacquainted with the manner of operation, and of which, therefore, some, who are unwilling to suppose any thing out of the reach of their own sagacity, have been inclined to doub...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)