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)

Date: November 19, 1793

"The mind, freed from her weighty companion, roams at large through the regions of fancy; and at once conceives and invents, beautifies and illustrates, amplifies and adorns."

— Boyd, Hugh (1746-1794)

Date: 1794

"At the same time that our young performer continues to play with great exactness this accustomed tune, she can bend her mind, and that intensely, on some other object, according with the fourth article of the preceding propositions."

— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)

Date: 1796

"But her mind, far from them all, was hovering on the edge of the shore, where Edgar was walking."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1798

"In a robust and unwavering judgment of this sort, there is a kind of witchcraft; when it decides justly, it produces a responsive vibration in every ingenuous mind."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: August 1817

"Whenever any object takes such a hold on the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in love, or kindling it to a sentiment of admiration;--whenever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, ...

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: 1854

"The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of ideas; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneous activity; the voltaic-pile is not strong enough to produce crystallizations; phantasms of great ideas float through her mind, but she has not ...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1854

"The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: April, 1871

"Intensity. This is the main cause why the ideas that flash on the minds of seers, as in Scott's description, are believed; they come mostly when the nerves are exhausted by fasting, watching and longing; they have a peculiar brilliancy, and therefore they are believed."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)