Date: 1794

"Whereas a due exercise of the faculties of the mind strengthens and improves those faculties, whether of imagination or recollection; as the exercise of our limbs in dancing or fencing increases the strength and agility of the muscles thus employed."

— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)

Date: 1798

"The original plan of Mary, respecting her residence in France, had no precise limits in the article of duration; the single purpose she had in view being that of an endeavour to heal her distempered mind."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1817

"My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above the ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1831

"In the ruminations of the inner man, and the dissecting our thoughts and desires, we employ our intellectual arithmetic, we add, and subtract, and multiply, and divide, without asking the aid, without adverting to the existence, of our joints and members"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"He does not think it worth his while under these circumstances, to 'gird up the loins of his mind.'"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"Self-respect to be nourished in the mind of the pupil, is one of the most valuable results of a well conducted education."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)