Date: 1737, 1743

"Our Passions are like Convulsion-Fits, which, although they make us stronger for the time, leave us the weaker ever after."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1737, 1743

"Superstition is the Spleen of the Soul."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1737, 1743

"Wit in Conversation is only a readiness of thought and a facility of Expression, or (in the Midwives Phrase) a quick Conception and an easie Delivery."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1737

"You see 'tis with weak heads as with weak stomachs, they immediately throw out what they received last; and what they read floats upon the surface of their mind, like oil upon water, without incorporating."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1743

"The language of poesy brings all into action; and to represent a Critic encompassed with books, but without a supper, is a picture which lively expresseth how much the true Critic prefers the diet of the mind to that of the body, one of which he always castigates, and often totally neglects for ...

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1743

"Thy mental eye, for thou hast much to view: / Old scenes of glory, times long cast behind / Shall, first recall'd, rush forward to thy mind: / Then stretch thy sight o'er all her rising reign, / And let the past and future fire thy brain."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1788

"The mind's disease, perhaps, I'm not less a stranger to--Oh! trust the noble patient to my care."

— Inchbald [née Simpson], Elizabeth (1753-1821)

Date: 1792

A passion may burst "from the grave, in evil hour" and hasten to its prey with fiercer pow'r and "vulture-like, with appetite increas'd" riot on the undiminish'd feast

— Jerningham, Edward (1727-1812)

Date: 1962

"Sandy screwed her eyes even smaller in the effort of seeing with her mind."

— Spark, Muriel (1918-2006)

Date: 1975

"His soul, like his stomach, was in turmoil."

— Lodge, David (b. 1935)