Date: 1774

"While awake, and in health, this busy principle [the imagination] cannot much delude us: it may build castles in the air, and raise a thousand phantoms before us; but we have every one of the senses alive, to bear testimony to its falsehood."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"But in sleep it is otherwise; having, as much as possible, put our senses from their duty, having closed the eyes from seeing, and the ears, taste, and smelling, from their peculiar functions, and having diminished even the touch itself, by all the arts of softness, the imagination is then left ...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"As in madness, the senses, from struggling with the imagination, are at length forced to submit, so, in sleep, they seem for a while soothed into the like submission: the smallest violence exerted upon any one of them, however, rouzes all the rest in their mutual defence; and the imagination, th...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: March, 1778

"What that power is by which the conscious spirit governs and directs various mental faculties, is, it must be confessed, utterly inexplicable as long as our souls are enclosed in material frames. While a watch is shut up in its case, we cannot see how the operations of its curious machinery are ...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: March, 1778

"And my similitude between a watch in its case, and the soul in its material frame, will, I persuade myself, be agreeable to all my readers, whose dispositions are mild, and like better to be pleased with what they read, than to attack it."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1779, 1781

"The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapours of incipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason, without eclipsing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Addison seems to have been deterred from prosecuting his own design."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"The man that sits down to suppose himself charged with treason or peculation, and heats his mind to an elaborate purgation of his character from crimes which he was never within the possibility of committing, differs only by the infrequency of his folly from him who praises beauty which he never...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"His strength always appears in his agility; his volatility is not the flutter of a light, but the bound of an elastick mind."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"The heat of Milton's mind might be said to sublimate his learning, to throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"An accumulation of knowledge impregnated his mind, fermented by study and exalted by imagination."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)