Date: 1754
"But yet so difficult is the intellectual commerce, so narrow the intellectual fund, that the wisest men are frequently obliged to employ their money like counters, and their counters like money, in one case, however, without loss, in the other without fraud. We may be said to do the first, that ...
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1759
"That is, let not great Examples, or Authorities, browbeat thy Reason into too great a diffidence of thyself: Thyself so reverence as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad; such borrowed riches make us poor."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1762
"The pleasure of a train of ideas, is the most remarkable in a reverie; especially where the imagination interposes, and is active in coining new ideas, which is done with wonderful facility."
preview | full record— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)
Date: 1767, 1778
Science may "bid the soul her own rich funds employ, / Increase her treasures, and her wealth enjoy."
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)
Date: 1785
"To apply his great mind to minute particulars, is wrong: it is like taking an immense balance, such as is kept on quays for weighing cargoes of ships, to weigh a guinea. I knew I had neat little scales, which would do better; and that his attention to every thing which falls in his way, and his ...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1789
"A different store his richer freight imparts-- / The gem of virtue, and the gold of hearts; / The social sense, the feelings of mankind, / And the large treasure of a godlike mind!"
preview | full record— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)
Date: 1792
"The variety of nature is such, that new objects, and new combinations of them, are continually adding something to our fund, and inlarging our collection: while the same kind of object occurring frequently, is seen under various shapes; and makes us, if I may so speak, more learned in nature."
preview | full record— Gilpin, William (1724-1804)
Date: 1805
"Your Worth and Talents will unfold, / Richer than Needlework of Gold; / The native treasures of the soul, / True--as the Needle to the Pole."
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)
Date: 1817
"But he, the bard of every age and clime, / Of genius fruitful, ardent and sublime, / Who, from the glowing mint of fancy, pours / No spurious metal, fused from common ores, / But gold, to matchless purity refined, / And stamp'd with all the godhead in his mind."
preview | full record— Gifford, William (1756-1826)
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)