Date: 1667, 1710

"O be at leisure to look within, and get David's Candle and Lanthorn to go into those dark Corners of your Soul with it, and it may be you may see that within which may make your Heart to ake, and your Joints to quiver, and your Spirits to faint within you."

— Janeway, James (1636?-1674)

Date: 1678

"Dares afraid his reasons house / (Though he had scarce so much as goose) / About his batter'd ears should tumble"

— Philips, John (1676-1709)

Date: 1678

"He lik't not banging sans defeizance. / While t'other labors all he can / To make a window to his brain."

— Philips, John (1676-1709)

Date: 1759

"If not with Prejudice, and Passion blind, / In Reason's Glass, you will your Error find. / Search the Recesses of the human Soul, / Mark there, what secret Springs her Acts controul."

— Marriott, Thomas (d. 1766)

Date: 1776

"But the greatest happiness of the greatest number requires, that they should be not only imagined but proved: and this they shall now be, in so far as natural probability, aided by whatever support it may be thought to receive from the character of the narrator, can gain credence, for the indica...

— Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832)

Date: 1794

"My own mind is my own church."

— Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)

Date: 1794

"Every person of learning is finally his own teacher; the reason of which is, that principles, being of a distinct quality to circumstances, cannot be impressed upon the memory; their place of mental residence is the understanding, and they are never so lasting as when they begin by conception."

— Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)

Date: March 5, 2015

"We all have crowded bookshelves in our heads crammed with texts for every person we know. They knock about in our skulls, falling off the shelves. We refer to them again and again, wearing the pages thin."

— Grossman-Heinze, Dahlia