Date: 1762

"In the latter passage, the most striking circumstances are selected to fill the mind with the grand and terrible. The former is a collection of minute and low circumstances, which scatter the thought and make no impression."

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1762

"Grandeur and novelty fix the attention for a considerable time, excluding all other ideas; and the mind thus occupied feels no vacuity."

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1762

"In such a state, the train of perceptions must not only be slow, but extremely uniform. Anger newly inflamed eagerly grasps its object, and leaves not a cranny in the mind for another thought than of revenge."

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1771

"He thinks nothing more absurd than the common notion of Instruction, as if Science were to be poured into the Mind, like water into a cistern, that passively waits to receive all that comes."

— Harris, James (1709-1780)

Date: December 14, 1770; 1771

"He examines his own mind, and perceives there nothing of that divine inspiration, with which, he is told, so many others have been favoured. He never travelled to Heaven to gather new ideas; and he finds himself possessed of no other qualifications than what mere common sense and a plain underst...

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: December 10, 1774; 1775

"The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated."

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: December 10, 1774; 1775

"A mind enriched by an assemblage of all the treasures of antient and modern Art, will be more elevated and fruitful in resources in proportion to the number of ideas which have been carefully collected and thoroughly digested."

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: December 10, 1774; 1775

"There can be no doubt but that he who has the most materials has the greatest means of invention; and if he has not the power of useing them, it must proceed from a feebleness of intellect; or from the confused manner in which those collections have been laid up in his mind."

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: December 10, 1774; 1775

"Like a sovereign judge and arbiter of Art, he is possessed of that-presiding power which separates and attracts every excellence from every school; selects both from what is great, and what is little; brings home knowledge from the East and from the West; making the universe tributary towards fu...

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: 1778

"An exact imitation, therefore, of those pictures, is likely to fill the student’s mind with false opinions, and to send him back a colourist of his own formation, with ideas equally remote from nature and from art, from the genuine practice of the masters and the real appearances of things."

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)