Date: 1790

"Their view calls off his attention from his own view; and his breast is, in some measure, becalmed the moment they come into his presence. This effect is produced instantaneously and, as it were, mechanically; but, with a weak man, it is not of long continuance."

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1790

"Without the restraint which this principle imposes, every passion would, upon most occasions, rush headlong, if I may say so, to its own gratification."

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1790, 1794

"How many fine-spun threads of reasoning would my wandering thoughts have broken; and how difficult should I have found it to arrange arguments and inferences in the cells of my brain!"

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1791

"The dissipation of thought, of which you complain, is nothing more than the vacillation of a mind suspended between different motives, and changing its direction as any motive gains or loses strength."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: December 10, 1790; 1791

"But I am sure that mechanic excellence invigorated and emboldened his mind to carry Painting into the regions of Poetry, and to emulate that Art in its most adventurous flights."

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: 1791

"I cannot allow any fragment whatever that floats in my memory concerning the great subject of this work to be lost."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1793

"It is curious to observe the first dawn of genius breaking on the mind. Sometimes a man of genius, in his first effusions, is so far from revealing his future powers, that, on the contrary, no reasonable hope can be formed of his success."

— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)

Date: 1793

"In the violent struggle of his mind, he may give a wrong direction to his talents; as Swift, in two pindaric odes, which have been unfortunately preserved in his works."

— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)

Date: 1793

"Milton had perhaps wandered in the fields of fancy, and consoled his blindness with listening to the voice of his nation, that was to have resounded with his name."

— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)

Date: 1793

"To solace mental fatigue by the amusements of fancy, is no loss of time. Students know how often the eye is busied in wandering over the page, while the mind lies in torpid inactivity; they therefore compute their time, not by the hours consumed in study, but by the real acquisitions they obtain...

— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)