Date: 1774

"Penetration implies such a force of imagination as leads to the comprehension and explication of a subject: brightness of imagination fits a man for adorning a subject. A penetrating mind emits the rays by which truth is discovered: a bright fancy supplies the colours by which beauty is produced."

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1774, rev. 1787, 1779 in English

"A darkness spreads over my eyes; heaven and earth seem to dwell in my soul and absorb all its powers, like the idea of a beloved mistress."

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749-1832)

Date: 1774, rev. 1787, 1779 in English

"At times when I am ready to shoot myself, she plays that air, and the darkness which hung over me is dispersed, and I breathe freely again."

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749-1832)

Date: 1774

"A learned parson, rusting in his cell, at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well upon the nature of man; will profoundly analyze the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the senses, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what; and yet, unfortunately, h...

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1774

"Their hearts of comfort felt no ray."

— Blacklock, Thomas (1721-1791)

Date: 1775

"What fancied zone can circumscribe the Soul, / Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs, / By Reason's light on Resolution's wings, / Spite of her frail / companion, dauntless goes / O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows? "

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1776

"The lights of the mind are, if I may so express myself, in an opposite situation to the lights of the body."

— Campbell, George (1719-1796)

Date: 1776

"By the memory, on the contrary, that great luminary of the mind, things past are exhibited in retrospect; we have no correspondent faculty to irradiate the future: and even in matters which fall not within the reach of our memory, past events are often clearly discoverable by testimony, and by e...

— Campbell, George (1719-1796)

Date: 1767, 1778

"The dawning mind would drink each classic ray, / And pants impatient for a brighter day"

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1767, 1778

"Here science, like the sun, see radiant rise, / With intellectual beam, through mental skies, / To gild, to gladden all th' improving space, / With taste, with candor, learning, sense, and grace; / To light up all the mind's remotest cells, / Where fancy fledges, and where genius dwells."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)