Date: 1754

"The scene of the mind, like a moving picture, must be governed with attention, that it may bring into our view the images we want, and as we want them. Otherwise ideas that are foreign to our actual train of thinking will frequently rush into our thoughts, and become objects of them whether we w...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"Bred to think as well as speak by rote, they furnish their minds, as they furnish their houses or cloath their bodies, with the fancies of other men, and according to the mode of the age and country."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"A few ideas, or parts of ideas, that slip out of the bundle of covetousness, make it the bundle of frugality: and a few added to that of frugality, make it the bundle of covetousness."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"Intellect, the artificer, works lamely without his proper instrument, sense; which is the case when he works on moral ideas."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"The idea I have, when this word is used, is always that of some particular white extension, or of several such whose ideas rush confusedly into the mind together."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"The words man or animal, raise in his mind no general idea; but in this case, as in the former, some particular idea of man, which the mind can frame without thinking of Alexander or Henry, rises there, and becomes representative of all men in general: or else several ideas of men, and other ani...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"Ideas and notions are the money of wise men, and they pay with these; whilst they mark and compute, with words, the money of fools."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"But yet so difficult is the intellectual commerce, so narrow the intellectual fund, that the wisest men are frequently obliged to employ their money like counters, and their counters like money, in one case, however, without loss, in the other without fraud. We may be said to do the first, that ...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"It is hard for another reason; because imagination, whose talents are neither precision nor propriety, not the former at least, is employed in the application of one of these sets of ideas and words to the other, and because it rarely happens that great heat of imagination, and great coolness of...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"Such they may be called, for though foreign ideas divert the attention of the mind, when they break in unsought and by violence, they help it often when they have been sought and are admitted by choice."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)