Date: December 1790

"The vulgar have not the power of emptying their mind of the only ideas they imbibed whilst their hands were employed; they cannot quickly turn from one kind of life to another."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"A few fundamental truths meet the first enquiry of reason, and appear as clear to an unwarped mind, as that air and bread are necessary to enable the body to fulfil its vital functions; but the opinions which men discuss with so much heat must be simplified and brought back to first principles; ...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"Perhaps the most improving exercise of the mind, confining the argument to the enlargement of the understanding, is the restless enquiries that hover on the boundary, or stretch over the dark abyss of uncertainty."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1791

"Each vice, to minds depraved by bondage known, / With sure contagion fastens on his own."

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1791

Corruption may sicken the heart

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1791, 1806

"Oh! horrid Night! / Thou prying Monitor confest! / Whose key unlocks the human breast, / And bares each avenue to mental sight!"

— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)

Date: 1791

"Lady Castlenorth was laying up a little magazine of literature, which she intended to open on Willoughby the next day; and her daughter was contemplating in her mind's eye, the handsome person of Willoughby, the figure they should make at Court, and the triumph there would be, when without degra...

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1792

"Yet disappointed as we are, in our researches, the mind gains strength by the exercise, sufficient, perhaps, to comprehend the answers which, in another step of existence, it may receive to the anxious questions it asked, when the understanding with feeble wing was fluttering round the visible e...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"Yet, when I exclaim against novels, I mean when contrasted with those works which exercise the understanding and regulate the imagination."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1793, 1806

The "eye of Reason" may "cloudless shine"

— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)