Date: 1796

"I have read the emotions of your bosom; you are yet ill skilled in concealing them, and they could not escape my attentive eye."

— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)

Date: 1796

"The mind of a young woman lady should be clear and unsullied, like a sheet of white paper, or her own fairer face"

— Hays, Mary (1760-1843)

Date: 1797

"You are juvenile, and like unto a white sheet of paper, on which vice or righteousness may be impressed."

— Anonymous

Date: 1797

"An habitual gloom and severity prevailed over the deep lines of his countenance; and his eyes were so piercing that they seemed to penetrate, at a single glance, into the hearts of men, and to read their most secret thoughts; few persons could support their scrutiny, or even endure to meet them ...

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1800

"The pen is a pacifyer. It checks the mind's career; it circumscribes her wanderings."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1814

"You should listen to me till you were tired, and advise me till you were tired still more; but it is impossible to put an hundredth part of my great mind on paper, so I will abstain altogether, and leave you to guess what you like.

— Austen, Jane (1775-1817)

Date: 1860

"Consider, too, that all the pleasant little dim ideas and complacencies -- of standing well with Timpson, of dispensing advice when he was asked for it, of impressing his friend Tulliver with additional respect, of saying something and saying it emphatically, with other inappreciably minute ingr...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"But then, it is open to some one else to follow great authorities and call the mind a sheet of white paper or a mirror, in which case one's knowledge of the digestive process becomes quite irrelevant."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"At present, in relation to this demand that he should learn Latin declensions and conjugations, Tom was in a state of as blank unimaginativeness concerning the cause and tendency of his sufferings, as if he had been an innocent shrewmouse imprisoned in the split trunk of an ash tree in order to ...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1927

"As for the inner book of unknown symbols (symbols carved in relief they might have been, which my attention, as it explored my unconscious, groped for and stumbled against and followed the contours of, like a diver exploring the ocean-bed), if I tried to read them, no one could help me with any ...

— Proust, Marcel (1871-1922)