Date: 1698

"Our own Thoughts, and those of others, do, in all our Conversations, use to come to us, clad in Words: Whence it happens, that 'tis very hard, liquidly and clearly to strip the Sense from those Words; and to consider It, and nothing but It."

— Sergeant, John (1622-1707)

Date: 1737

"So many things freely thrown out, such lengths of unreserv'd friendship, thoughts just warm from the brain, without any polishing or dress, the very dishabille of the understanding."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

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: 1782

"Alas! there are some stupid souls, formed of such phlegmatic, adverse materials, that you might sooner strike conception into a flannel petticoat--or out of one--(now keep your temper I beg, sweet Sir) than convince their simple craniums that six and seven makes thirteen."

— Sancho, Charles Ignatius (1729-1780)

Date: 1790, 1794

"Their turn of expression is a dress that hangs so gracefully on gay ideas, that you are apt to suppose that wit, a quality parsimoniously distributed in other countries, is in France as common as the gift of speech."

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: December 1790

"But it was the poor man with only his native dignity who was thus oppressed – and only metaphysical sophists and cold mathematicians can discern this insubstantial form; it is a work of abstraction – and a gentleman of lively imagination must borrow some drapery from fancy before he can love or ...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)