Date: w. 1762-3, published 1950

"Lord Elibank has just a cabinet of curiosities [in his mind], which are well ranged and of which he has an exact catalogue."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: w. 1762-3, published 1950

"He considered the mind of man like a room, which is either made agreeable or the reverse by the pictures with which it is adorned."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: w. 1764, 1953

"My mind is like an air-pump which receives and ejects ideas with wonderful facility."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"Formerly my mind was quite a lodging-house for all ideas who chose to put up there, so that it was at the mercy of accident, for I had no fixed mind of my own. Now my mind is a house where, though the street rooms and the upper floors are open to strangers, yet there is always a settled family i...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"Only this more. The ideas--my lodgers--are of all sorts. Some, gentlemen of the law, who pay me a great deal more than others. Divines of all sorts have been with me, and have ever disturbed me. When I first took up house, Presbyterian ministers used to make me melancholy with dreary tones. Meth...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"This family! this landlord, let me say, or this landlady, as the mind and the soul are both she. I shall confuse myself with metaphor. Let me then have done with it."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: September, 1770

"The feelings and passions of the character which he represents, must take full possession as it were of the antichamber of his mind, while his own character remains in the innermost recess."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: September, 1770

"But during the time of his pleading, the genuine colour of his mind is laid over with a temporary glaring varnish, which flies off instantaneously when he has finished his harangue."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

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: March, 1778

"What that power is by which the conscious spirit governs and directs various mental faculties, is, it must be confessed, utterly inexplicable as long as our souls are enclosed in material frames. While a watch is shut up in its case, we cannot see how the operations of its curious machinery are ...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)