Date: 1751, 1777
"The one [reason] discovers objects, as they really stand in nature, without addition or diminution: The other [taste] has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1752
"His Mind was formed of those firm Materials, of which Nature formerly hammered out the Stoic, and upon which the Sorrows of no Man living could make an Impression. "
preview | full record— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)
Date: 1754
"In the first place, we must offer him the tribute of our gold, as to our true King; that is, we must daily present him with our souls, stampt with his own image, and burnished with divine love."
preview | full record— Challoner, Richard (1691-1781)
Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757
"Men's minds are temper'd, like their swords, for war."
preview | full record— Home, John (1722-1808)
Date: 1761
"Soon as the guilty passion is allay'd, / The green and morbid colour of our souls / Is chang'd to virgin white; a gentle breeze / Of pity springs within us."
preview | full record— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)
Date: 1761
"Did not your master Plato maintain, that all the art of man, that all philosophy could not extract from the human mind what nature had not implanted there; as all the operations in chemistry are incapable of extracting from any mixture more gold than is already contained in it?"
preview | full record— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778); Kenrick, William (1729/30-1779)
Date: 1764
"Bold was the man, and fenc'd in ev'ry part /With oak, and ten-fold brass about the heart, / To build a play who tortur'd first his brain, / And then dar'd launch it on this stormy main."
preview | full record— Murphy, Arthur (1727-1805)
Date: 1765
"If all [the mind] had was the mere capacity to receive those items of knowledge--a passive power to do so, as indeterminate as the power of wax to receive shapes or of a blank page to receive words--it would not be the source of necessary truths"
preview | full record— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)
Date: 1768
"Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your passions, tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them?"
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: December 10, 1774; 1775
"He will pick up from dunghills what by a nice chymistry, passing through his own mind, shall be converted into pure gold; and, under the rudeness of Gothic essays, he will find original, rational, and even sublime inventions."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)