Date: 1754

"The mind of man does often what princes and states have done. It gives a currency to brass and copper coined in the several philosophical and theological mints, and raises the value of gold and silver above that of their true standard."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"Bred to think as well as speak by rote, they furnish their minds, as they furnish their houses or cloath their bodies, with the fancies of other men, and according to the mode of the age and country."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: w. 1762-3, published 1950

"Lord Elibank has just a cabinet of curiosities [in his mind], which are well ranged and of which he has an exact catalogue."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: w. 1762-3, published 1950

"He considered the mind of man like a room, which is either made agreeable or the reverse by the pictures with which it is adorned."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"But I should think a man of fashion makes but an indifferent exchange, who lays out all that time in furnishing his house which he should have employed in the furniture of his head; a person who shews no other symptoms of taste than his cabinet or gallery, might as well boast to me of the furnit...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"Formerly my mind was quite a lodging-house for all ideas who chose to put up there, so that it was at the mercy of accident, for I had no fixed mind of my own. Now my mind is a house where, though the street rooms and the upper floors are open to strangers, yet there is always a settled family i...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"Only this more. The ideas--my lodgers--are of all sorts. Some, gentlemen of the law, who pay me a great deal more than others. Divines of all sorts have been with me, and have ever disturbed me. When I first took up house, Presbyterian ministers used to make me melancholy with dreary tones. Meth...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: September, 1770

"The feelings and passions of the character which he represents, must take full possession as it were of the antichamber of his mind, while his own character remains in the innermost recess."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1774

"While awake, and in health, this busy principle [the imagination] cannot much delude us: it may build castles in the air, and raise a thousand phantoms before us; but we have every one of the senses alive, to bear testimony to its falsehood."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"Reason, therefore, at once gives judgment upon the cause; and the vagrant intruder, imagination, is imprisoned, or banished from the mind."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)