Date: 1742
"So engaging are the sentiments of humanity, that they brighten up the very face of sorrow, and operate like the sun, which, shining on a dusky cloud or falling rain, paints on them the most glorious colours which are to be found in the whole circle of nature."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1748, 1777
"When we reflect on our past sentiments and affections, our thought is a faithful mirror, and copies its objects truly; but the colours which it employs are faint and dull, in comparison of those in which our original perceptions were clothed."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1748, 1777
"And by this means, we may, perhaps, attain a new microscope or species of optics, by which, in the moral sciences, the most minute, and most simple ideas may be so enlarged as to fall readily under our apprehension, and be equally known with the grossest and most sensible ideas, that can be the ...
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1751, 1777
"And, indeed, without such a correction of appearances, both in internal and external sentiment, men could never think or talk steadily on any subject; while their fluctuating situations produce a continual variation on objects, and throw them into such different and contrary lights and positions."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1751, 1777
"They [cruel ideas] still haunt his solitary hours, damp his most aspiring thoughts, and show him, even to himself, in the most contemptible and most odious colours imaginable."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1751
"His mind does not receive the impression of the moral world, in the same manner, as wax receives the impression of a seal. It does not reflect the image of it, in the same manner, as a mirror reflects its images: it has a peculiar cast and turn given to its conceptions, admirably ordered to exal...
preview | full record— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)
Date: 1751
"But this discovery is by no means confined to colours as they exist out of the mind, either in the rays of light, or surfaces of bodies; but is equally true of the ideas of colours in the mind itself: for it appears, by experiments, that the idea of red and the idea of yellow, confounded in the ...
preview | full record— Whytt, Robert (1714-1766)
Date: 1759
"Unfortunately this moral looking-glass is not always a very good one. Common looking-glasses, it is said, are extremely deceitful, and by the glare which they throw over the face, conceal from the partial eyes of the person many deformities which are obvious to every body besides. But there is n...
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1759
"Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before. It is placed in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with, which always mark when they enter into, and when they disapprove of his sentiments; and it is here that he first views the propriet...
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1764
"Such principles are parts of our constitution, no less than the power of thinking: reason can neither make nor destroy them; nor can it do any thing without them: it is like a telescope, which may help a man to see farther, who hath eyes; but without eyes, a telescope shows nothing at all."
preview | full record— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)