Date: 1760-7
"With all my precautions, how was my system turned topside turvy in the womb with my child! his head exposed to the hand of violence, and a pressure of 470 pounds averdupois weight acting so perpendicularly upon its apex---that at this hour 'tis ninety per Cent. insurance, that the fine network o...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1761
"A veil of wisdom and honour makes so many folds about her heart, that it is impenetrable to human eyes, even to her own."
preview | full record— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778); Kenrick, William (1729/30-1779)
Date: 1761
"Happy in exposing your follies only to your friends, make haste, and I will wait for you here; but be sure you do not return, till you have removed that fatal veil which is woven in your brain."
preview | full record— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778); Kenrick, William (1729/30-1779)
Date: 1768
"I could not help looking for some time at him as I sat in the remise--the more I look'd at him, his croix, and his basket, the stronger they wove themselves into my brain."
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1774
"A learned parson, rusting in his cell, at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well upon the nature of man; will profoundly analyze the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the senses, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what; and yet, unfortunately, h...
preview | full record— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)
Date: 1777
"I'd hangings weave, in fancy's loom / For Lady Norton's dressing room."
preview | full record— Mason, William (1725-1797)
Date: 1785
"I was surpriz'd, taken unawares, passion ran away with me like an unbroke horse: but I have got him under now; I can govern him with a twine of thread."
preview | full record— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)
Date: 1785
"Threads of politic and shrewd design" that charge the mind with meanings may be (or not, as it were) disentangled from "the puzzled skein"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: December 10, 1790; 1791
"When the Student has been habituated to this grand conception of the Art, when the relish for this stile is established, makes a part of himself, and is woven into his mind, he will, by this time, have got a power of selecting from whatever occurs in nature that is grand, and corresponds with th...
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: 1794
"When we are suddenly awaked by any violent stimulus, the surprise totally disunites the trains of our sleeping ideas from these of our waking ones; but if we gradually awake, this does not happen; and we readily unravel the preceding trains of imagination."
preview | full record— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)