Date: 1776

"Nothing is so swift as thought; a ray of recollection beamed upon my mind, and brought back to my remembrance the once smiling countenance of Nancy Weston, whose father had been one of the under masters at Winchester, at whose house I boarded, when I was placed at college there."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1776

"The lights of the mind are, if I may so express myself, in an opposite situation to the lights of the body."

— Campbell, George (1719-1796)

Date: 1776

"By the memory, on the contrary, that great luminary of the mind, things past are exhibited in retrospect; we have no correspondent faculty to irradiate the future: and even in matters which fall not within the reach of our memory, past events are often clearly discoverable by testimony, and by e...

— Campbell, George (1719-1796)

Date: 1777

"The philosophical doctrine of the slow recession of bodies from the sun, is a lively image of the reluctance with which we first abandon the light of virtue."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1777

"If I may be allowed to change the allusion so soon, I would say, that the passions also resemble fires, which are friendly and beneficial when under proper direction, but if suffered to blaze without restraint, they carry devastation along with them, and, if totally extinguished, leave the benig...

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1777

"When a nation begins to emerge from a state of mental darkness, and to strike out the first rudiments of improvement, it chalks out a few strong but incorrect sketches, gives the rude out-lines of general art, and leaves the filling up to the leisure of happier days, and the refinement of more e...

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1777

"Col. Dormer, though he knew the human heart, had never yet thought of taking his nieces in more active scenes of life: he had fallen into the common mistake of people past the meridian of their days, who, feeling tranquillity their greatest good, do not sufficiently reflect that it is insipid at...

— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)

Date: 1767, 1778

"The dawning mind would drink each classic ray, / And pants impatient for a brighter day"

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1767, 1778

"Here science, like the sun, see radiant rise, / With intellectual beam, through mental skies, / To gild, to gladden all th' improving space, / With taste, with candor, learning, sense, and grace; / To light up all the mind's remotest cells, / Where fancy fledges, and where genius dwells."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: April, 1778

"Cicero, upon whose mind the advancing rays of celestial philosophy beamed with a brightness very admirable in a Pagan period of time, before the Sun of Righteousness arose, and shone forth in full splendour upon the world, informs us, in his Tusculan Questions, of a very remarkable interview bet...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)