Date: February 1792

"Whatever wisdom constituently is, it is like a seedless plant; it may be reared when it appears, but it cannot be voluntarily produced."

— Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)

Date: 1793

"It is of great importance that this idea should be extirpated."

— 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: 1831

"We spurn at the bounds of time and space; nor would the thought be less futile that imagines to imprison the mind within the limits of the body, than the attempt of the booby clown who is said within a thick hedge to have plotted to shut in the flight of an eagle"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"There are a multitude of causes that will produce a miscarriage of this sort, where the richest soil, impregnated with the choicest seeds of learning and observation, shall entirely fail to present us with such a crop as might rationally have been anticipated"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

" For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious p...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)