Date: 1701

"Man is a Creature of so mixed a Composure, and of a Frame so inconsistent and different from Itself, that it easily speaks his Affinity to the highest and meanest Beings; that is to say, he is made of Body and Soul, he is at once an Engine and an Engineer."

— Steele, Sir Richard (1672-1729)

Date: 1701

"This may give him hopes, that tho' his Trunk return to its native Dust he may not all Perish, but the Inhabitant of it may remove to another Mansion; especially since he knows only Mechanically that they have, not Demonstratively how they have, even a present Union."

— Steele, Sir Richard (1672-1729)

Date: 1704

"The practitioners of this famous art proceed, in general, upon the following fundamental, that the corruption of the senses is the generation of the spirit; because the senses in men are so many avenues to the fort of reason, which, in this operation, is wholly blocked up."

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1704

"All endeavours must be therefore used, either to divert, bind up, stupify, fluster, and amuse the senses, or else, to justle them out of their stations; and while they are either absent, or otherwise employed, or engaged in a civil war against each other, the spirit enters and performs ...

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1704

"Here it may not be amiss to add a few words upon the laudable practice of wearing quilted caps; which is not a matter of mere custom, humour, or fashion, as some would pretend, but an institution of great sagacity and use; these, when moistened with sweat, stop all perspiration, and by ...

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1704

"For, it is the opinion of choice virtuosi, that the brain is only a crowd of little animals, but with teeth and claws extremely sharp, and therefore cling together in the contexture we behold, like the picture of Hobbes's Leviathan, or like bees in perpendicular swarm upon a tr...

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1704

"They hold also, that these animals are of a constitution extremely cold; that their food is the air we attract, their excrement phlegm; and that what we vulgarly called rheums, and colds, and distillations, is nothing else but an epidemical looseness, to which that little commonwealth is very su...

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1704

"The first ingredient toward the art of canting, is, a competent share of inward light; that is to say, a large memory plentifully fraught with theological polysyllables, and mysterious texts from holy writ, applied and digested by those methods and mechanical operations already related:...

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1704

"A master workman shall blow his nose so powerfully as to pierce the hearts of his people, who were disposed to receive the excrements of his brain with the same reverence as the issue of it."

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1704

"For, some think that the spirit is apt to feed on the flesh, like hungry wines upon raw beef."

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)