Date: 1760-7

"Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal; but Gold and Silver will pass all the world over without any other recommendation than their own weight."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1762

"The pleasure of a train of ideas, is the most remarkable in a reverie; especially where the imagination interposes, and is active in coining new ideas, which is done with wonderful facility."

— Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1696-1782)

Date: 1765, 1770

"These baseless structures, fictions light and vain, / Coin'd in the foldings of an idle brain, / To their absurd inventors I resign, / They are not in the Church's creed, or mine."

— Wodhull, Michael (1740-1816)

Date: 1782

"The mind and conduct mutually imprint / And stamp their image in each other's mint."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: November 10, 1783

"He gives, what bankrupt Nature never can, / Whose noblest coin is light and brittle man, / Gold, purer far than Ophir ever knew, / A soul, an image of himself, and therefore true."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1803

"But, wishing to enrich me more, to fill / My mind with treasure, led'st me far away / From city din to deep retreats, to banks / And streams Aonian, and, with free consent, / Didst place me happy at Apollo's side."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: November 1824

"Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored ...

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800-1859)