Date: 1831

"Familiar as [Shakespeare] was with the evanescent touches of mind en dishabille, and in its innermost feelings, he could not sustain the tone of a character, penetrated with a divine enthusiasm, or fervently devoted to a generous cause, though this is truly within the compass of our nature."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

At a period in history the mind of man may be imagined "sunk into a profound sleep"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"Terence and Virgil maintain an universal, undisputed empire over the minds of men. "

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

Cowley "was a most amiable man; and the loveliness of his mind shines out in his productions"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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)