Date: 1785

"He that attends to his interior self, [...] Has business; feels himself engaged to achieve / No unimportant, though a silent task."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1785

"[W]hen the mind is absent, and the thoughts are wandering to something else than what is passing in the place in which we are, we are often miserable"

— Paley, William (1743-1805)

Date: 1785

"He [Johnson] said, he did not grudge Burke's being the first man in the House of Commons, for he was the first man every where; but he grudged that a fellow who makes no figure in company, and has a mind as narrow as the neck of a vinegar cruet, should make a figure in the House of Commons, mere...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1785

"Without such instances as you mention my dear, my mind, which was once likely to become the seat of the Furies, has not only been calmed and improved by the instructions of my present dear mamma, but also by attention to opinions given in company, concerning people judged to possess viole...

— P. I.

Date: 1785

"Thus colour must be in something coloured; figure in something figured; thought can only be in something that thinks; wisdom and virtue cannot exist but in some being that is wise and virtuous."

— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)

Date: 1785

"Aristotle taught, that all the objects of our thought enter at first by the senses; and, since the sense cannot receive external material objects themselves, it receives their species; that is, their images or forms, without the matter; as wax receives the form of the seal without any of the mat...

— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)

Date: 1785

"They held, that all bodies continually send forth slender films or spectres from their surface, of such extreme subtilty, that they easily penetrate our gross bodies, or enter by the organs of sense, and stamp their image upon the mind."

— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)

Date: 1785

"Modern Philosophers, as well as the Peripatetics and Epicureans of old, have conceived, that external objects cannot be the immediate objects of our thought; that there must be some image of them in the mind itself, in which, as in a mirror, they are seen."

— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)

Date: 1785

"Language is the express image and picture of human thoughts; and, from the picture, we may often draw very certain conclusions with regard to the original."

— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)

Date: 1785

"To this it is owing, that, in ancient languages, the word which denotes the soul, is that which properly signifies breath or air."

— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)