page 1 of 4     per page:
sorted by:

Date: 1742

"Surely then no mistakes are ever committed in this affair; but every man, however dissolute and negligent, proceeds in the pursuit of happiness, with as unerring a motion, as that which the celestial bodies observe, when, conducted by the hand of the Almighty, they roll along the ethereal plains."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

preview | full record

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"'Twas thus, if ancient fame the truth unfold, / Two faithful needles, from the informing touch / Of the same parent-stone, together drew / Its mystic virtue, and at first conspir'd / With fatal impulse quivering to the pole."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

preview | full record

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"So all things which have life aspire to God, / The sun of being, boundless, unimpair'd, / Center of souls!"

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

preview | full record

Date: 1746

"Passions are opposed to passions and one can serve as a counterweight to another."

— Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-1747)

preview | full record

Date: 1746

"As the grave sage, who studies to explore, / Some cause phaenonimous--unknown before, / With patience waits--revolving in his mind / The vast events--attending human kind, / Till some propitious star his soul inspires, / And gives the great solution he requires."

— Ruffhead, James

preview | full record

Date: 1748, 1777

"And shall we esteem it worthy the labour of a philosopher to give us a true system of the planets, and adjust the position and order of those remote bodies; while we affect to overlook those, who, with so much success, delineate the parts of the mind, in which we are so intimately concerned?"

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

preview | full record

Date: 1751, 1777

"Virtue, placed at such a distance, is like a fixed star, which, though to the eye of reason, it may appear as luminous as the sun in his meridian, is so infinitely removed, as to affect the senses, neither with light nor heat."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

preview | full record

Date: 1751, 1777

"Why do philosophers infer, with the greatest certainty, that the moon is kept in its orbit by the same force of gravity, that makes bodies fall near the surface of the earth, but because these effects are, upon computation, found similar and equal? And must not this argument bring as strong conv...

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

preview | full record

Date: 1751

"The mind, therefore, in producing the vital and other involuntary motions, does not act as a rational, but as a sentient principle; which, without reasoning upon the matter, is as necessarily determined by an ungrateful sensation or stimulus affecting the organs, to exert its power, in bringing ...

— Whytt, Robert (1714-1766)

preview | full record

Date: Tuesday, January 8, 1751

"The old peripatetick principle, that Nature abhors a vacuum, may be properly applied to the intellect, which will embrace any thing, however absurd or criminal, rather than be wholly without an object."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

preview | full record

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.