Date: 1745

"Imagination is the Paphian shop, / Where feeble Happiness, like Vulcan, lame, / Bids foul Ideas, in their dark recess, / And hot as hell, (which kindled the black fires,) / With wanton art, those fatal arrows form / Which murder all thy time, health, wealth, and fame."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1745

"Give Pleasure's name to nought but what has pass'd / Th' authentic seal of Reason, (which, like Yorke, / Demurs on what it passes,) and defies / The tooth of Time; when pass'd, a pleasure still; / Dearer on trial, lovelier for its age, / And doubly to be prized, as it promotes / Our future, whil...

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1745

"His understanding 'scapes the common cloud / Of fumes arising from a boiling breast."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1745

"Each act, each thought, he questions, "What its weight, / Its colour what, a thousand ages hence?" / And what it there appears, he deems it now. / Hence, pure are the recesses of his soul; / The god-like man has nothing to conceal."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"But why are Originals so few? not because the Writer's harvest is over, the great Reapers of Antiquity having left nothing to be gleaned after them; nor because the human mind's teeming time is past, or because it is incapable of putting forth unprecedented births."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"Both are founded on the same bottom; on our ignorance of the possible dimensions of the mind of man."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"That is, let not great Examples, or Authorities, browbeat thy Reason into too great a diffidence of thyself: Thyself so reverence as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad; such borrowed riches make us poor."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"Are not our minds cast in the same mould with those before the flood? The flood affected matter; mind escaped."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"How have thy Houyhnhunms thrown thy judgment from its seat, and laid thy imagination in the mire?"

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)