Date: 1785

"I was delighted with this flash bursting from the cloud which hung upon his mind, closed my letter directly, and joined the company."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1785

"Transient clouds darkened my imagination, and in those clouds I saw events from which I shrunk; but a sentence or two of the Rambler's conversation gave me firmness, and I considered that I was upon an expedition for which I had wished for years, and the recollection of which would be a treasure...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1789

"Thus all things added to my pain, / While grief compell'd me to complain; / When sable clouds began to rise / My mind grew darker than the skies."

— Equiano, Olaudah [Gustavus Vasa] (c. 1745-1797)

Date: 1790

"His mind must be calm and placid as a summer's evening, and his body in an attitude of ease."

— Young Lady

Date: December 1790

"Ambition becomes only the tool of vanity, and his reason, the weather-cock of unrestrained feelings, is only employed to varnish over the faults which it ought to have corrected."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"These lively conjectures are the breezes that preserve the still lake from stagnating"

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1791

"I have a wonderful superstitious love of mystery; when, perhaps, the truth is, that it is owing to the cloudy darkness of my own mind."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1791

"I said to him, I was sure that human life was not machinery, that is to say, a chain of fatality planned and directed by the Supreme Being, as it had in it so much wickedness and misery, so many instances of both, as that by which my mind was now clouded."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1791

"I compared him at this time to a warm West-Indian climate, where you have a bright sun, quick vegetation, luxuriant foliage, luscious fruits; but where the same heat sometimes produces thunder, lightening, and earthquakes in a terrible degree.

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1792

"The passions also, the winds of life, would be useless, if not injurious, did the substance which composes our thinking being, after we have thought in vain, only become the support of vegetable life, and invigorate a cabbage, or blush in a rose."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)