Date: 1777

"Great allowances must be made for a profusion of gaiety, loquacity, and even indiscretion in children, that there may be animation enough left to supply an active and useful character, when the first fermentation of the youthful passions is over, and the redundant spirits shall come to subside."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1777

"If I may be allowed to change the allusion so soon, I would say, that the passions also resemble fires, which are friendly and beneficial when under proper direction, but if suffered to blaze without restraint, they carry devastation along with them, and, if totally extinguished, leave the benig...

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1777

"For I never will believe that envy, though passed through all the moral strainers, can be refined into a virtuous emulation, or lying improved into an agreeable turn for innocent invention."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1777

"Almost all the other passions may be made to take an amiable hue; but these two must either be totally extirpated, or be always contented to preserve their original deformity, and to wear their native black."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1777

"Good sense is a judicious mechanic, who can produce beauty and convenience out of suitable means; but Genius (I speak with reverence of the immeasurable distance) bears some remote resemblance to the divine architect, who produced perfection of beauty without any visible materials, 'who spake, a...

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1779, 1781

"The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapours of incipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason, without eclipsing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Addison seems to have been deterred from prosecuting his own design."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"The man that sits down to suppose himself charged with treason or peculation, and heats his mind to an elaborate purgation of his character from crimes which he was never within the possibility of committing, differs only by the infrequency of his folly from him who praises beauty which he never...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"His strength always appears in his agility; his volatility is not the flutter of a light, but the bound of an elastick mind."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"The heat of Milton's mind might be said to sublimate his learning, to throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"An accumulation of knowledge impregnated his mind, fermented by study and exalted by imagination."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)