Date: 1691

"Within the inner Closet of my Brain / Attend the nobler Members of my Train; / Invention, Master of my Mint, grows there, / And Memory, my faithful Treasurer."

— Dunton, John (1659–1732)

Date: 1691

"Hunger will caper over stone Walls, I might add, over Hills set upon Hills, and therefore did I chuse in Affliction rather to make my Brains my Exchequer, than (like a Modest Gentleman) to groan under the Slavery of a Blushing Temper."

— Dunton, John (1659–1732)

Date: 1751

"The captain had a fund of great goodnature in his heart, but was somewhat too much addicted to passion, and frequently apt to resent without a cause, but when once convinced he had been in the wrong, no one could be more ready to acknowlege and ask pardon for his mistake."

— Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza (1693?-1756)

Date: 1752

"'But you understand Human Nature to the Bottom,' answered Amelia;' and your Mind is a Treasury of all ancient and modern Learning.'"

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: 1753

"Tho' this letter was somewhat shorter than those she usually wrote to him, yet the few lines it contain'd discovered, without her designing to do so, such a well establish'd fund of tenderness in her soul, as cannot but be discernable to every understanding reader."

— Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza (1693?-1756)

Date: 1788

"When Rochely got home, he set about examining the state of his heart exactly as he would have examined the check book of one of his customers."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1790

"The idle crowd in fashion's train, / Their trifling comment, pert reply, / Who talk so much, yet talk in vain, / How pleas'd for thee, Oh nymph, I fly! / For thine is all the wealth of mind, / Thine the unborrow'd gems of thought, / The flash of light, by souls refin'd, / From heav'n's empyreal ...

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1796

"While his fancy coined these ideas, he paced his cell with a disordered air."

— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)

Date: 1992

"If your mind works like a cash register, anything you come up with is bound to be cheap"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)