Date: 1767
"Poetic Genius in particular cannot flourish either in uninterrupted SUNSHINE, or in continual SHADE. It languishes under the blazing ardor of a summer noon, as its buds are blasted by the damp fogs and chilling breath of a winter sky."
preview | full record— Duff, William (1732-1815)
Date: 1774
"Were it necessary to produce instances of a fruitful imagination unproductive of true genius, we might find enough among those pretenders to poetry, who can, through many lines, run from one shining image to another, and finish many harmonious periods, without any sentiment or design; or among t...
preview | full record— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)
Date: 1774
"When a vegetable draws in moisture from the earth, nature, by the same action by which it draws it in, and at the same time, converts it to the nourishment of the plant: it at once circulates through its vessels, and is assimilated to its several parts. In like manner, genius arranges its ideas ...
preview | full record— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)
Date: 1774
"As a rich soil produces not only the largest quantity of grain, but also the greatest profusion of such weeds as tend to choak it; so a fertile imagination, along with just and useful ideas, produces many trifling, false, and improper thoughts, which, if they be not immediately examined by reaso...
preview | full record— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)
Date: 1783
" In this way, too, we learn to think for ourselves, and acquire in time a stock of knowledge that is properly of our own growth: which is proof, that our minds are really cultivated, and serves as an encouragement to persist in making further acquisitions."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1784
"In general the faculties of the mind must be expanded to a certain degree, before religion will take root, or flourish among a people; and a certain proportion of civil liberty is necessary, on which to found that expansion of the mind, which moral or religious liberty requires."
preview | full record— Ramsay, James (1733-1789)