Date: December 1790

"These lively conjectures are the breezes that preserve the still lake from stagnating"

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1791

"I have a wonderful superstitious love of mystery; when, perhaps, the truth is, that it is owing to the cloudy darkness of my own mind."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1791

"I said to him, I was sure that human life was not machinery, that is to say, a chain of fatality planned and directed by the Supreme Being, as it had in it so much wickedness and misery, so many instances of both, as that by which my mind was now clouded."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1791

"I compared him at this time to a warm West-Indian climate, where you have a bright sun, quick vegetation, luxuriant foliage, luscious fruits; but where the same heat sometimes produces thunder, lightening, and earthquakes in a terrible degree.

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1792

"The passions also, the winds of life, would be useless, if not injurious, did the substance which composes our thinking being, after we have thought in vain, only become the support of vegetable life, and invigorate a cabbage, or blush in a rose."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"Like the lightning's flash are many recollections; one idea assimilating and explaining another, with astonishing rapidity."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"For it is the right use of reason alone which makes us independent of everything--excepting the unclouded reason--'Whose service is perfect freedom.'"

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"The senses and the imagination give a form to the character, during childhood and youth; and the understanding, as life advances, gives firmness to the first fair purposes of sensibility, till virtue, arising rather from the clear conviction of reason than the impulses of the heart, morality is ...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"Thus degraded, her reason, her misty reason! is employed rather to burnish than to snap her chains."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1793

"Nothing is more luxuriant to a thinking mind than self approbation: It is a sun which dispels the clouds of solicitude and anxiety."

— Anonymous [By an American Lady]