Date: 1762

"The pleasure of a train of ideas, is the most remarkable in a reverie; especially where the imagination interposes, and is active in coining new ideas, which is done with wonderful facility."

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1779, 1781

"The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapours of incipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason, without eclipsing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Addison seems to have been deterred from prosecuting his own design."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"The man that sits down to suppose himself charged with treason or peculation, and heats his mind to an elaborate purgation of his character from crimes which he was never within the possibility of committing, differs only by the infrequency of his folly from him who praises beauty which he never...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"His strength always appears in his agility; his volatility is not the flutter of a light, but the bound of an elastick mind."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"The heat of Milton's mind might be said to sublimate his learning, to throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"An accumulation of knowledge impregnated his mind, fermented by study and exalted by imagination."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1781

"The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1781

"He [Young] plays, indeed, only on the surface of life; he never penetrates the recesses of the mind, and therefore the whole power of his poetry is exhausted by a single perusal; his conceits please only when they surprise."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1783

Epicurus "fancied, that an infinite multitude of subtle images; some flowing from bodies, some formed in the air of their own accord, and others made up of different things variously combined, are always moving up and down around us: and that these images, being of extreme fineness, penetrate our...

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1783

"The want of air and exercise, with interrupted digestion, unhinges the bodily frame: and the mind, long and violently exerted in one direction, like a bow long bent, loses its elasticity, and, unable to recover itself, remains stupidly fixed in the same distorted posture"

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)