Date: 1611-12, 1623
"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased; / Pluck from the memory of a rooted sorrow; / Raze out the written troubles of the brain; / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?"
preview | full record— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)
Date: 1690, 1694, 1695, 1700, 1706
"In all these cases, Ideas in the Mind, quickly fade, and often vanish quite out of the Understanding, leaving no more footsteps or remaining Characters of themselves, than Shadows do flying over fields of Corn; and the Mind is as void of them, as if they never had been there."
preview | full record— Locke, John (1632-1704)
Date: 1697
"Besides, long causes working in her mind, / And secret seeds of envy, lay behind; / Deep graven in her heart the doom remain'd / Of partial Paris, and her form disdain'd; / The grace bestow'd on ravish'd Ganymed, / Electra's glories, and her injur'd bed."
preview | full record— Dryden, John (1631-1700)
Date: 1704
"Now I confess I am of Opinion, that the Mind is so far from being a Rasa Tabula, that it is plentifully furnished with all Ideas of Truth, which are the Seeds and Principles of all Knowledge we have, or ever shall have; that we cannot form any one true Notion, but what is founded in some ...
preview | full record— Sherlock, William (1639/40-1707)
Date: 1741
"Vertue's noble mark ... extending by degrees, / Shall grow like Letters carv'd on Trees / That widen with the Bark."
preview | full record— Duck, Stephen (1705-1756)
Date: 1754
"The human soul is so far from being furnished with forms and ideas to perceive all things by, or from being impregnated, I would rather say than printed over, with the seeds of universal knowledge, that we have no ideas till we receive passively the ideas of sensible qualities from without."
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1765
"That fruit thy covenant may yield, / Which is upon my forehead seal'd, / And on my heart ingraft."
preview | full record— Smart, Christopher (1722-1771)
Date: 1789
"Ah! hide for ever from my sight / The faithless flatterer Hope--whose pencil, gay, / Portrays some vision of delight, / Then bids the fairy tablet fade away; / While in dire contrast, to mine eyes / Thy phantoms, yet more hideous, rise, / And Memory draws, from Pleasure's wither'd flower, / Corr...
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)