Date: Saturday, December 21, 1751
"A careless glance upon a favourite author, or transient survey of the varieties of life, is sufficient to supply the first hint or seminal idea, which, enlarged by the gradual accretion of matter stored in the mind, is by the warmth of fancy easily expanded into flowers, and sometimes ripened in...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, February 12, 1751
"There are many diseases both of the body and mind, which it is far easier to prevent than to cure, and therefore I hope you will think me employed in an office not useless either to learning or virtue, if I describe the symptoms of an intellectual malady, which, though at first it seizes only th...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: March 24, 1752
"The Mind of Man is compared by Montaigne to a fertile Field, which tho' it be left entirely uncultivated, still retains all its genial Powers; but instead of producing any Thing lovely or profitable, sends forth only Weeds and wild Herbs of various Kinds, which serve to no Use or Emolument whats...
preview | full record— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)
Date: 1753
"The knowledge of good is form'd in our souls, as the seeds are in the ground; there is a time when they lie conceal'd, a time when they spring forth, and a time when they bear fruit"
preview | full record— Du Bosc, Jacques (d. 1660)
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: 1754
"They are, if I may say so, of the mind's own growth, the elements of knowledge, more immediate, less relative, and less dependent than sensitive knowledge, as any man will be apt to think, who compares his ideas of remembering, recollecting, bare thought, and intenseness of thought, with those o...
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1754
But when we enter into a serious and impartial detail concerning this knowledge, and analyse carefully what the great pretenders to it have given and give us daily for knowledge, we shall be obliged to confess, that the human intellect is rather a rank than a fertile soil, barren without due cult...
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
Date: 1755
"I remember upon my having a Fit of Illness, my Mother, who was apprehensive of my Death, and consequently, thro' excessive Fondness, us'd all Means to prevent it that lay within her Power, sent me to Thorly, in Hertfordshire, the Seat of Dr. Hales, an eminent Physician and Relation, with a Desig...
preview | full record— Charke [née Cibber; other married name Sacheverell], Charlotte [alias Mr Brown] (1713-1760)
Date: 1757
"Their root strikes deeper into the mind, and springs from the essential and universal properties of human nature."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1759
"To enforce the observation of justice, therefore, nature has implanted in the human breast that consciousness of ill-desert, those terrors of merited punishment which attend upon its violation, as the great safe-guards of the association of mankind, to protect the weak, to curb the violent, and ...
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)