Date: 1792

"We mean not to bring it into competition with any of the more useful ends of travelling: but as many travel without any end at all, amusing themselves without being able to give a reason why they are amused, we offer an end, which may possibly engage some vacant minds; and may indeed afford a ra...

— Gilpin, William (1724-1804)

Date: 1792

"Having gained by a minute examination of incidents a compleat idea of an object, our next amusement arises from inlarging, and correcting our general stock of ideas."

— Gilpin, William (1724-1804)

Date: 1792

"The imagination of a painter, really great in his profession, is a magazine abounding with all the elegant forms, and striking effects, which are to be found in nature."

— Gilpin, William (1724-1804)

Date: 1793

"It is necessary that the mind of a writer should be richly stored with anecdotes of all kinds."

— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)

Date: 1794

"If our recollection or imagination be not a repetition of animal movements, I ask, in my turn, What is it? You tell me it consists of images or pictures of things. Where is this extensive canvas hung up? or where are the numerous receptacles in which those are deposited? or to what else in the a...

— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)

Date: 1831

Anaxarchus when "ordered by Nicocreon, tyrant of Salamis, to be pounded in a mortar [...] in contempt of his mortal sufferings, exclaimed, 'Beat on, tyrant! thou dost but strike upon the case of Anaxarchus; thou canst not touch the man himself'"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"The mind is so infinitely superior in character to this case of flesh that incloses it, that he cannot persuade himself that it and the body perish together"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"They skim away from one flower in the parterre of literature to another, like the bee, without, like the bee, gathering sweetness from each, to increase the public stock, and enrich the magazine of thought."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the un...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)