Date: w. c. 1709, 1711
"For as in Bodies, thus in Souls, we find / What wants in Blood and Spirits, swell'd with Wind: / Pride, where Wit fails, steps in to our Defence, / And fills up all the mighty Void of Sense!"
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: December 24, 1711
"It may indeed fill the Mind for a while with a giddy kind of Pleasure, but it is such a Pleasure as makes a Man restless and uneasy under it; and which does not so much satisfy the present Thirst, as it excites fresh Desires, and sets the Soul on new Enterprises."
preview | full record— Addison, Joseph (1672-1719)
Date: 1727
"Homer's Notion of the State of the Dead, was something like the ancient Philosophy of the Aegyptians, which gave the Soul a Shape like the Body, and that it was only a Receptacle of the Mind; the Mind they made to be the sublime and superior Part, and that only."
preview | full record— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)
Date: 1732
"This fill'd her Mind with torturing Agonies; and her whole Soul bled for this Carlo's victim, whom there was now no way Wit could invent to rescue from the Danger."
preview | full record— Boyd, Elizabeth (fl. 1727-1745)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"Hitherto the stores, / Which feed thy mind and exercise her powers, / Partake the relish of their native soil, / Their parent earth."
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1733, 1748
Memory is a "Surprising storehouse! in whose narrow womb / All things, the past, the present, and to come, / Find ample space, and large and mighty room."
preview | full record— Pilkington, Laetitia (c. 1709-1750)
Date: 1757
"The mind of man has naturally a far greater alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in searching for differences; because by making resemblances we produce new images, we unite, we create, we enlarge our stock; but in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the imagi...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1790
"All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: December 1790
"The vulgar have not the power of emptying their mind of the only ideas they imbibed whilst their hands were employed; they cannot quickly turn from one kind of life to another."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1791
"Johnson was much attached to London: he observed, that a man stored his mind better there, than any where else; and that in remote situations a man's body might be feasted, but his mind was starved, and his faculties apt to degenerate, from want of exercise and competition."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)