Date: 1754

"The mind would be little more than a channel through which ideas and notions glided from entity into nonentity."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"But when they are recalled with difficulty, and dragged back slowly, as it were, and by pieces and parcels into the mind, it is no wonder if they receive much greater alteration."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"When they are assigned to complex ideas, they are meant as knots according to the very proper image Mr. Locke gives of them, to tie each specific bundle of ideas together: and in these respects they are not only useful, but necessary."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"The scene of the mind, like a moving picture, must be governed with attention, that it may bring into our view the images we want, and as we want them. Otherwise ideas that are foreign to our actual train of thinking will frequently rush into our thoughts, and become objects of them whether we w...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"Bred to think as well as speak by rote, they furnish their minds, as they furnish their houses or cloath their bodies, with the fancies of other men, and according to the mode of the age and country."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"A few ideas, or parts of ideas, that slip out of the bundle of covetousness, make it the bundle of frugality: and a few added to that of frugality, make it the bundle of covetousness."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"Intellect, the artificer, works lamely without his proper instrument, sense; which is the case when he works on moral ideas."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"The idea I have, when this word is used, is always that of some particular white extension, or of several such whose ideas rush confusedly into the mind together."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"The words man or animal, raise in his mind no general idea; but in this case, as in the former, some particular idea of man, which the mind can frame without thinking of Alexander or Henry, rises there, and becomes representative of all men in general: or else several ideas of men, and other ani...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"Ideas and notions are the money of wise men, and they pay with these; whilst they mark and compute, with words, the money of fools."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)