Date: 1794

"The rasa tabula will not allow us to have mental ideas."

— Sullivan, Richard Joseph, Sir (1752-1806)

Date: 1795

"A soft sponginess of character that will easily acquire any hue, or any stain; a tabula rasa of intellect; a spirit invulnerable to insult; that (for example) after vain endeavors to disunite and discourage the Catholics of Ireland, could condescend to [end page 2] truck and chaffer, for the off...

— Drennan, William (1754-1820)

Date: June 19, 1834

"I know my own sentiments, because I can read my own mind, but the minds of the rest of man and woman-kind are to me as sealed volumes, hieroglyphical scrolls, which I can not easily unseal or decipher."

— Brontë, Charlotte (1816-1855)

Date: June 19, 1834

"How many after having, as they thought, discovered the word friend in the mental volume, have afterwards found that they have read false friend!"

— Brontë, Charlotte (1816-1855)

Date: June 19, 1834

"I have long seen 'friend' in your mind, in your words and actions, but now distinctly visible, and clearly written in characters that cannot be distrusted, I discern true friend."

— Brontë, Charlotte (1816-1855)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: Late Autumn, 1882

"A letter always seemed to me like Immortality, for is it not the mind alone, without corporeal friend?"

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)