Date: December 1790

"A few fundamental truths meet the first enquiry of reason, and appear as clear to an unwarped mind, as that air and bread are necessary to enable the body to fulfil its vital functions; but the opinions which men discuss with so much heat must be simplified and brought back to first principles; ...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"To argue from experience, it should seem as if the human mind, averse to thought, could only be opened by necessity; for, when it can take opinions on trust, it gladly lets the spirit lie quiet in its gross tenement."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"Perhaps the most improving exercise of the mind, confining the argument to the enlargement of the understanding, is the restless enquiries that hover on the boundary, or stretch over the dark abyss of uncertainty."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"These lively conjectures are the breezes that preserve the still lake from stagnating"

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"Man has been termed, with strict propriety, a microcosm, a little world in himself."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"[A]n immoderate desire to please contracts the faculties, and immerges, to borrow the idea of a great philosopher, the soul in matter, till it becomes unable to mount on the wing of contemplation."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"Go hence, thou slave of impulse, look into the private recesses of thy heart, and take not a mote from thy brother’s eye, till thou hast removed the beam from thine own."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1793

"Of all bondage, mental bondage is surely the most fatal; the absurd despotism which has hitherto, with more than gothic barbarity, enslaved the female mind, the enervating and degrading system of manners by which the understandings of women have been chained down to frivolity and trifles, have i...

— Hays, Mary (1760-1843)

Date: 1795

"A soft sponginess of character that will easily acquire any hue, or any stain; a tabula rasa of intellect; a spirit invulnerable to insult; that (for example) after vain endeavors to disunite and discourage the Catholics of Ireland, could condescend to [end page 2] truck and chaffer, for the off...

— Drennan, William (1754-1820)

Date: 1802

"With my inward eye 'tis an old man grey, / With my outward a thistle across the way."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)