Date: 1761

"The great Mr. Locke has resembled the infant mind to a rasa tabula, as he expresses it a clean piece of paper, with no inscriptions, tho' susceptible of them."

— Stiles, Ezra (1727-1795)

Date: 1791, 1794

"I would endure it all chearfully, could I but once more see my dear, blessed mother, hear her pronounce my pardon, and bless me before I died; but alas! I shall never see her more; she has blotted the ungrateful Charlotte from her remembrance, and I shall sink to the grave loaded with her's and ...

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1791, 1794

"Oh! never, never! whilst I have existence, will the agony of that moment be erased from my memory."

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1793

"Such is the natural imbecility of the human mind, it confines us to the immediate scenes in which we are engaged, and as new objects present the past is in a degree erased from recollection."

— Anonymous [By an American Lady]

Date: 1800

"The pen is a pacifyer. It checks the mind's career; it circumscribes her wanderings."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: September 10, 1836

"Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an appendix to the soul."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: 1867

"This book by any yet unread, / I leave for you when I am dead, / That being gone, here you may find / What was your living mother's mind."

— Bradstreet, Anne (1612-1672)

Date: Late Autumn, 1882

"A letter always seemed to me like Immortality, for is it not the mind alone, without corporeal friend?"

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1890

"We noticed smallest things, / Things overlooked before, / By this great light upon our  minds / Italicized, as 't were."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1911

"A friend may almost literally pour out his soul into our waiting ears, or we may almost literally read it in his eyes."

— Lewis, Edwin Herbert (1866-1938)