Date: December 1790

"[A]n immoderate desire to please contracts the faculties, and immerges, to borrow the idea of a great philosopher, the soul in matter, till it becomes unable to mount on the wing of contemplation."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"Go hence, thou slave of impulse, look into the private recesses of thy heart, and take not a mote from thy brother’s eye, till thou hast removed the beam from thine own."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1793

"Of all bondage, mental bondage is surely the most fatal; the absurd despotism which has hitherto, with more than gothic barbarity, enslaved the female mind, the enervating and degrading system of manners by which the understandings of women have been chained down to frivolity and trifles, have i...

— Hays, Mary (1760-1843)

Date: 1795 (w. 1787)

"Words may flatter you, but the countenance never can deceive you; the eyes are the windows of the soul, and through them you are to watch what passes in the inmost recesses of the heart."

— Edgeworth, Maria

Date: 1809

"Could my ideas flow as fast as the rain in the store-closet it would be charming."

— Austen, Jane (1775-1817)

Date: June 19, 1834

"I know my own sentiments, because I can read my own mind, but the minds of the rest of man and woman-kind are to me as sealed volumes, hieroglyphical scrolls, which I can not easily unseal or decipher."

— Brontë, Charlotte (1816-1855)

Date: June 19, 1834

"How many after having, as they thought, discovered the word friend in the mental volume, have afterwards found that they have read false friend!"

— Brontë, Charlotte (1816-1855)

Date: June 19, 1834

"I have long seen 'friend' in your mind, in your words and actions, but now distinctly visible, and clearly written in characters that cannot be distrusted, I discern true friend."

— Brontë, Charlotte (1816-1855)

Date: 1842

"Absence cannot guard the cell / Where wayward thoughts are doom'd to dwell"

— Blamire, Susanna (1747-1794)

Date: Late Autumn, 1882

"A letter always seemed to me like Immortality, for is it not the mind alone, without corporeal friend?"

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)