Date: 1790, 1794, 1795, 1818, 1827

"The cistern contains: the fountain overflows / One thought, fills immensity."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: December 1790

"The vulgar have not the power of emptying their mind of the only ideas they imbibed whilst their hands were employed; they cannot quickly turn from one kind of life to another."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1794

"If our recollection or imagination be not a repetition of animal movements, I ask, in my turn, What is it? You tell me it consists of images or pictures of things. Where is this extensive canvas hung up? or where are the numerous receptacles in which those are deposited? or to what else in the a...

— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)

Date: 1794

"The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1797

"'If you are under any promise of secresy,' interrupted Vivaldi, 'I forbid you to tell this wonderful tale, which, however, seems somewhat too big to rest within your brain.'"

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1797

"Having said this, I am prepared to meet whatever suffering you shall inflict upon me; but be assured, that my own voice never shall sanction the evils to which I may be subjected, and that the immortal love of justice, which fills all my heart, will sustain my courage no less powerfully than the...

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1799

"Nor seldom Indolence these lawns among / Fixes her turf-built seat; and wears the garb / Of deep philosophy, and museful sits, / In dreamy twilight of the vacant mind, / Soothed by the whispering shade; for soothing soft / The shades; and vistas lengthening into air, / With moonbeam rainbows ti...

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1831

Anaxarchus when "ordered by Nicocreon, tyrant of Salamis, to be pounded in a mortar [...] in contempt of his mortal sufferings, exclaimed, 'Beat on, tyrant! thou dost but strike upon the case of Anaxarchus; thou canst not touch the man himself'"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"The mind is so infinitely superior in character to this case of flesh that incloses it, that he cannot persuade himself that it and the body perish together"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"They skim away from one flower in the parterre of literature to another, like the bee, without, like the bee, gathering sweetness from each, to increase the public stock, and enrich the magazine of thought."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)