Date: 1774

"When a vegetable draws in moisture from the earth, nature, by the same action by which it draws it in, and at the same time, converts it to the nourishment of the plant: it at once circulates through its vessels, and is assimilated to its several parts. In like manner, genius arranges its ideas ...

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1774

"As a rich soil produces not only the largest quantity of grain, but also the greatest profusion of such weeds as tend to choak it; so a fertile imagination, along with just and useful ideas, produces many trifling, false, and improper thoughts, which, if they be not immediately examined by reaso...

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1783

" In this way, too, we learn to think for ourselves, and acquire in time a stock of knowledge that is properly of our own growth: which is proof, that our minds are really cultivated, and serves as an encouragement to persist in making further acquisitions."

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1784

"In general the faculties of the mind must be expanded to a certain degree, before religion will take root, or flourish among a people; and a certain proportion of civil liberty is necessary, on which to found that expansion of the mind, which moral or religious liberty requires."

— Ramsay, James (1733-1789)

Date: 1791

"His mind resembled a fertile, but thin soil. There was a quick, but not a strong vegetation, of whatever chanced to be thrown upon it. No deep root could be struck. The oak of the forest did not grow there: but the elegant shrubbery and the fragrant parterre appeared in gay succession."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1791

"Your resolution to obey your father I sincerely approve; but do not accustom yourself to enchain your volatility by vows; they will sometime leave a thorn in your mind, which you will, perhaps, never be able to extract or eject."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1791

"He was of opinion, that the English nation cultivated both their soil and their reason better than any other people; but admitted that the French, though not the highest, perhaps, in any department of literature, yet in every department were very high."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1798

"When a man enters to it, he is not only to be taught true wisdom, but he is withal, yea, first of all, to be untaught the errors and wickedness that are deep-rooted in his mind, which he hath not only learned by the corrupt conversation of the world with him."

— Leighton, Robert (1611-1684)

Date: 1814

A "ripening mind" may be "fitted for a throne"

— Grant [née MacVicar], Anne (1755-1838)

Date: 1891

"So those high orthodoxies came to be / Quick seeds in me of heterodox opinion, / And, ere I wist, my thoughts were all at sea, / And drifted, holden by no wise dominion."

— Smith, Walter Chalmers (1824-1908)