Date: 1757

"Behold, thro' fancy's mirrour, what a scene / The phantom opens, ample, wide, and fair, / Each golden minute, bearing as it flies / Imaginary raptures on its wing; / Flatt'ring my fond deluded heart with dreams / Of lasting pleasure--but alas, how soon / This fairy Eden to a waste is turn'd?"

— Hervey, James (1714-1758)

Date: 1759

Woes may haunt the mind (but the Gods may give "cruel Phantoms to the Wind"

— Grainger, James (1721-1766)

Date: 1760, 1761

"Reason, collected in herself, disdains / The slavish yoke of arbitrary chains"

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1760, 1761

"And Reason to herself alone is law."

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1787

"Still crowding thoughts, a pensive train, / Rose in my soul"

— Burns, Robert (1759-1796)

Date: 1791

"Come then, my soul, be this thy guest, / And leave to knaves and fools the rest."

— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)

Date: 1936

"Everything is sordid, shoddy, thin as pasteboard. A Coney Island of the mind."

— Miller, Henry (1891-1980)

Date: 1936

"The monarch of the mind is a monkey wrench."

— Miller, Henry (1891-1980)

Date: 1936

"Lids closed, the eyes are watchful; the brain / carefully stalks the thought like a tiger / following the accurately-scented prey / through tangled jungle foliage."

— Edwin Rolfe (1909-1954)

Date: 1936

"The way / to certainty is charted now, / the sensitive ears alive to sound, / antennae poised for touch, and in the head / all tissue quivering like violin strings."

— Edwin Rolfe (1909-1954)