Date: 1831

"The human mind is a creature of celestial origin, shut up and confined in a wall of flesh"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1832

"The mind of a new-born infant .... so far from being, as Locke affirms, a sheet of blank paper, is ... a perfect encyclopedia, comprehending not only the newest discoveries, but all those still more valuable and wonderful inventions that will hereafter be made."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world"[1] and he considers the faculty which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

" For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The former [i.e., conception] is as a mirror which reflects, the latter [i.e., expression] as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communication"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the un...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind o...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)