Date: 1760-7

Ideas "follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1761, 1765

"A taste, improv'd by Education, finds / Pleasures where none appear to ruder minds; / Scenes, where the croud but few attractions see, / Affect it in an exquisite degree: / As telescopes, the finer ground, convey / More striking beauties by the visual ray; / Or magnets, as prepar'd the mor...

— Stevenson, William (1730-1783)

Date: September, 1770

"This double feeling is of various kinds and various degrees; some minds receiving a colour from the objects around them, like the effects of the sun beams playing thro' a prism; and others, like the cameleon, having no colours of their own, take just the colours of what chances to be nearest them."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1772-1781

What availed the songs of a "mighty mind, / With inward light irradiate, mirror-like / Receiv'd, and to mankind with ray reflex / The sov'reign Planter's primal work display'd?"

— Mason, William (1725-1797)

Date: 1774, rev. 1787, 1779 in English

"What is the whole world to our hearts without love? It is the optic machine of the Savoyards without light." [More literal translation: "Wilhelm, what would the world mean to our hearts without love! What is a magic lantern without its lamp!"]

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749-1832)

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...

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1782

"Where'er that Parent of engaging thought, / Warm Sensibility, like light, has taught / The bright'ning mirror of the mind to shew / Nature's reflected forms in all their glow."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1785

"I doubted that he would not be willing to come down from his elevated state of philosophical dignity; from a superiority of wisdom among the wise, and of learning among the learned; and from flashing his wit upon minds bright enough to reflect it."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1817, 1818

"'twas her lover's face-- / It might resemble her--it once had been / The mirror of her thoughts, and still the grace / Which her mind's shadow cast, left there a lingering trace"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)