Date: 1762-1763

"Youth is the best season wherein to acquire knowledge, tis a season when we are freest from care, the mind is then unencumbered & more capable of receiving impressions than in an advanced age—in youth the mind is like a tender twig, which you may bend as you please, but in age like a sturdy oak ...

— Adams, Abigail (1744-1818)

Date: 1771

"If they had made no impression upon his heart"

— Franklin, Benjamin (1706-1790)

Date: November 28, 1783

"Our Maker has given us this faithful internal monitor [the conscience], and if you always obey it, you will always be prepared for the end of the world, or for a more certain event, which is death."

— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)

Date: 1785

"Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind."

— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)

Date: 1820

"And they [Stewart, Tracy, Cabanis] ask why may not the mode of action called thought, have been given to a material organ of peculiar structure, as that of magnetism is to the needle, or of elasticity to the spring by a particular manipulation of the steel."

— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)

Date: 1820

"When I meet with a proposition beyond finite comprehension, I abandon it as I do a weight which human strength cannot lift, and I think ignorance, in these cases, is truly the softest pillow on which I can lay my head."

— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)

Date: 1829

"Death is only the removal of an immortal soul from dead matter, which many have considered merely as a clog to the soul."

— Balfour, Walter (1776-1852)

Date: 1829

"And if the man is as complete without the body, as he is without the house he resides in, the immortal soul ought to be thankful when it gets quit of the body."

— Balfour, Walter (1776-1852)

Date: 1850

"My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1850

"The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)