Date: 1718

"A thousand little Nerves She sends / Quite to our Toes, and Fingers Ends; / And These in Gratitude again / Return their Spirits to the Brain; / In which their Figure being printed / (As just before, I think, I hinted) / Alma inform'd can try the Case, / As She had seen upon the Place. // Thus, w...

— Prior, Matthew (1664-1721)

Date: 1741

"Then the Brain being well furnished with various Traces, Signatures and Images, will have a rich Treasure always ready to be proposed or offered to the Soul, when it directs its Thoughts towards any particular Subject."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"What an unknown and unspeakable Happiness would it be to a Man of Judgment, and who is engaged in the Pursuit of Knowledge, if he had but a Power of stamping all his own best Sentiments upon his Memory in some indelible Characters; and if he could but imprint every valuable Paragraph and Sentime...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"So for Instance, in Children; they perceive and forget a hundred Things in an Hour; the Brain is so soft that it receives immediately all Impressions like Water or liquid Mud, and retains scarce any of them: All the Traces, Forms or Images which are drawn there, are immediately effaced or closed...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"But Words and Things which he lately spoke or did, they are immediately forgot, because the Brain is now grown more dry and solid in its Consistence, and receives not much more impression than if you wrote with your Finger on a Floor of Clay, or a plaister'd Wall."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"Maronides had got the first hundred Lines of Virgil's 'Æneis' printed upon his Memory so perfectly, that he knew not only the Order and Number of every Verse from one to a hundred in Perfection, but the Order and Number of every Word in each Verse also."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"Let every thing we desire to remember be fairly and distinctly written and divided into Periods, with large Characters in the Beginning; for by this Means we shall the more readily imprint the Matter and Words on our Minds, and recollect them with a Glance, the more remarkable the Writi...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1752, 1791

"Not all the volumes on thy shelf, / Are worth that single volume, Self."

— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)

Date: 1752, 1791

"Life's records rise on ev'ry side, / And Conscience spreads those volumes wide; / Which faithful registers were brought / By pale-ey'd Fear and busy Thought. / Those faults which artful men conceal, / Stand here engrav'd with pen of steel, / By Conscience, that impartial scribe!"

— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)

Date: 1762

"Engraven on my heart and mind, / O that I could Thy precepts find"

— Wesley, John and Charles