Date: Tuesday, March 27, 1750
"The task of an author is, either to teach what is not known, or to recommend known truths by his manner of adorning them; either to let new light in upon the mind, and open new scenes to the prospect, or to vary the dress and situation of common objects, so as to give them fresh grace and more p...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, October 2, 1750
"[T]hough I do not pretend to give laws to the legislators of mankind, or to limit the range of those powerful minds that carry light and heat through all the regions of knowledge, yet I have long thought, that the greatest part of those who lose themselves in studies by which I have not found th...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1751, 1777
"There seems here a necessity for confessing that the happiness and misery of others are not spectacles entirely indifferent to us; but that the view of the former, whether in its causes or effects, like sun-shine or the prospect of well-cultivated plains, (to carry our pretensions no higher), co...
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1759
"His mighty mind travelled round the intellectual world; and, with a more than eagle's eye, saw, and has pointed out blank spaces, or dark spots in it, on which the human mind never shone."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1830
"To grasp intelligence as this night-like mine or pit in which is stored a world of infinitely many images and representations, yet without being in consciousness, is from the one point of view the universal postulate which bids us treat the notion as concrete, in the way we treat, for example, t...
preview | full record— Hegel, G. W. F. (1770-1831)
Date: July 21, 2014
"Perhaps because Harry's life, on the page and, even more luridly, onscreen, was measured out in highlights, as the plot demanded, whereas Mason is revealed in a string of lowlights, or in those episodes which seem dim and dull at the time, and only later shine in memory's cave."
preview | full record— Lane, Anthony (b. 1962)
Date: October 137, 2017
"But, because political campaigns occasionally can be wonderful bathyspheres to your soul’s dark abyss, we are learning that Moore’s is plenty deep and plenty dark."
preview | full record— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)