Date: 1792

"The imagination becomes a camera obscura, only with this difference, that the camera represents objects as they really are; while the imagination, impressed with the most beautiful scenes, and chastened by rules of art, forms it's pictures, not only from the most admirable parts of nature; but i...

— Gilpin, William (1724-1804)

Date: 1792

"Often, when slumber has half-closed the eye, and shut out all the objects of sense, especially after the enjoyment of some splendid scene; the imagination, active, and alert, collects it's scattered ideas, transposes, combines, and shifts them into a thousand forms, producing such exquisite scen...

— 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: 1792

"When we trust to the picture, that objects draw of themselves on the mind, we deceive ourselves. Without accurate, and particular observation, it is but ill-drawn at first: the outlines are soon blurred: the colours, every day grow fainter; and at last, when we would produce it to any body, we a...

— Gilpin, William (1724-1804)

Date: 1792

"The leading ideas must be fixed on the spot: if left to the memory, they soon evaporate."

— Gilpin, William (1724-1804)

Date: 1792

"So ductile is the understanding, and yet so stubborn, that the associations which depend on adventitious circumstances, during the period that the body takes to arrive at maturity, can seldom be disentangled by reason."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"One idea calls up another, its old associate, and memory, faithful to the first impressions, particularly when the intellectual powers are not employed to cool our sensations, retraces them with mechanical exactness."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"This habitual slavery, to first impressions, has a more baneful effect on the female than the male character, because business and other dry employments of the understanding, tend to deaden the feelings and break associations that do violence to reason."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"I should have been glad if I could have had an earlier opportunity also of knowing, which I do not admit at present, that it was genuine and authentic; because I know not only the impression which such a letter must make upon Gentlemen's minds who are the Jury to try the cause, b...

— Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)

Date: 1792

"Let all their thoughts be unconfined, / And clap your padlock on their mind."

— Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)