Date: 1656

"It is impossible, Lady, except you should alter the Fabrick of his mind, unbend its appetite, or give it new desires; for as long as the divine soul creating breath, is clad with different disposing matter, and cast in several moulds, there will be Wise and Fooles."

— Anonymous

Date: w. 1737, published 1738

"But when no Prelate's Lawn with Hair-shirt lin'd, / Is half so incoherent as my Mind, / When (each Opinion with the next at strife, / One ebb and flow of follies all my Life) / I plant, root up, I build, and then confound, / Turn round to square, and square again to round."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1760-7

"A Man's body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin's lining;--rumple the one--you rumple the other."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1761

"A veil of wisdom and honour makes so many folds about her heart, that it is impenetrable to human eyes, even to her own."

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778); Kenrick, William (1729/30-1779)

Date: 1776

"I am provoked at this natural incapacity of conveying my sentiments to you; words are but a cloak, or rather a clog, to our ideas; there should be no curtain before the hearts of friends; and the longing I have ever felt for an intuitive converse, is to me a strong argument for a future state."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: December 1790

"But it was the poor man with only his native dignity who was thus oppressed – and only metaphysical sophists and cold mathematicians can discern this insubstantial form; it is a work of abstraction – and a gentleman of lively imagination must borrow some drapery from fancy before he can love or ...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)