Date: 1759
"His mind is continually occupied with what is too grand and solemn, to leave any room for the impressions of those frivolous objects, which fill up the attention of the dissipated and the gay."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1759
"The soft, the amiable, the gentle virtues, all the virtues of indulgent humanity are in comparison but little insisted upon, and seem on the contrary, by the Stoics in particular, to have been often regarded as meer weaknesses which it behoved a wise man not to harbour in his breast."
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: September 15, 1759
"In the mythological pedigree of Learning, Memory is made the mother of the Muses by which the masters of ancient Wisdom, perhaps, meant to shew the necessity of storing the mind copiously with true notions, before the imagination should be suffered to form fictions or collect embellishments; for...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: September 15, 1759
"If the repositories of thought are already full, what can they receive?"
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: September 1, 1759.
"If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur, and every recurrence would reinstate them in their former place."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: September 1, 1759.
"The mind cannot retire from its enemy into total vacancy, or turn aside from one object but by passing to another."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1760
"Whenever this shall be executed, it is to be looked upon as the work of true genius; but when fallen short of, as often happens, it is to be deemed the impotent effort of the hard-bound brains of low plagiaries, whose memory is filled with the shreds and ill-chosen scraps of other mens wit."
preview | full record— Macklin, Charles (1697-1797)
Date: January 12, 1760
"To fix deeply in the mind the principles of science, to settle their limitations, and deduce the long succession of their consequences; to comprehend the whole compass of complicated systems, with all the arguments, objections, and solutions, and to reposite in the intellectual treasury the numb...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1761
"After the cursory view of Nature, which was concluded in my last Lecture, it may not be amiss to examine our own faculties, and see by what means we acquire and treasure up a knowledge of those things; and this is done, I apprehend, by means of the senses, the operations of the mind, and the mem...
preview | full record— Telescope, Tom [pseud.]
Date: 1762
"In the latter passage, the most striking circumstances are selected to fill the mind with the grand and terrible. The former is a collection of minute and low circumstances, which scatter the thought and make no impression."
preview | full record— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)