Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"Formerly my mind was quite a lodging-house for all ideas who chose to put up there, so that it was at the mercy of accident, for I had no fixed mind of my own. Now my mind is a house where, though the street rooms and the upper floors are open to strangers, yet there is always a settled family i...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"Only this more. The ideas--my lodgers--are of all sorts. Some, gentlemen of the law, who pay me a great deal more than others. Divines of all sorts have been with me, and have ever disturbed me. When I first took up house, Presbyterian ministers used to make me melancholy with dreary tones. Meth...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"This family! this landlord, let me say, or this landlady, as the mind and the soul are both she. I shall confuse myself with metaphor. Let me then have done with it."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: w. 1774-6, 1921

"As to the brutes it [whipping] inflicts no wound on their mind, whose Natures seem made to bear it, and whose sufferings are not attended with shame or pain beyond the present moment."

— Schaw, Janet (c. 1731-c. 1801)

Date: September 2, 1770 to September 12, 1773; October, 1770 [1777]

"So simple a people I scarce ever saw. They did 'open the window in their breast.' And it was easy to discern, that God was there, filling them with joy and peace in believing."

— Wesley, John (1703-1791)

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

"I doubted that he would not be willing to come down from his elevated state of philosophical dignity; from a superiority of wisdom among the wise, and of learning among the learned; and from flashing his wit upon minds bright enough to reflect it."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1785

"His mind was so full of imagery, that he might have been perpetually a poet."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1785

"He had a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, and gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking: yet, though grave and awful in his deportment, when he thought it necessary or proper, he frequently indulged himself in pleasantry and sportive s...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1785

"BOSWELL. 'But, sir,'tis like walking up and down a hill; one man will naturally do the one better than the other. A hare will run up a hill best, from her fore-legs being short; a dog down.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, sir; that is from mechanical powers. If you make mind mechanical, you may argue in that ma...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)