Date: w. 1761-2, rev. 1773-4, 1805

"J'abandonne mon esprit à tout son libertinage. Je le laisse maître de suivre la première idée sage ou folle qui se présente, comme on voit dans l'allée de Foy nos jeunes dissolus marcher sur les pas d'une courtisane à l'air éventé, au visage riant, à l'oeil vif, au nez retroussé, quitter celle-c...

— Diderot, Denis (1713-1784)

Date: 1823

"But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental, were banished"

— Lamb, Charles (1775-1834)

Date: 1831

"The mind may aptly be described under the denomination of the 'stranger at home.'"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"On set occasions and at appropriate times we examine our stores, and ascertain the various commodities we have, laid up in our presses and our coffers. Like the governor of a fort in time of peace, which was erected to keep out a foreign assailant, we occasionally visit our armoury, and take acc...

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"They may have perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are more finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have ...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"And the world would have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, became as...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: April, 1871

"Many beliefs, in Coleridge's happy phrase, slumber in the 'dormitory of the soul'; they are present to the consciousness, but they incite to no action."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: January, 1888

"So that the little people who manage man's internal theatre had not as yet received a very rigorous training; and played upon their stage like children who should have slipped into the house and found it empty, rather than like drilled actors performing a set piece to a huge hall of faces."

— Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894)

Date: January, 1888

"For myself--what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with the conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the gener...

— Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894)

Date: 1892, 1899

"If, for instance, you hear me call out A, B, C, it is ten to one that you will react on the impression by inwardly or outwardly articulating D, E, F. The impression arouses its old associates; they go out to meet it; it is received by them, recognized by the mind as 'the beginning of the alphabe...

— James, William (1842-1910)