Within the book and volume of my brain.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Hamlet. Act i. Sc. 5.

True, I talk of dreams,

Which are the children of an idle brain,

Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Romeo and Juliet. Act i. Sc. 4.

This is the very coinage of your brain:

This bodiless creation ecstasy

Is very cunning in.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Hamlet. Act iii. Sc. 4.

If ladies be but young and fair,

They have the gift to know it; and in his brain,

Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit

After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm'd

With observation, the which he vents

In mangled forms.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): As You Like It. Act ii. Sc. 7.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Macbeth. Act ii. Sc. 1.

Brain him with his lady's fan.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): King Henry IV. Part I. Act ii. Sc. 3.

Alas! they had been friends in youth;

But whispering tongues can poison truth,

And constancy lives in realms above;

And life is thorny, and youth is vain,

And to be wroth with one we love

Doth work like madness in the brain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): Christabel. Part ii.

Carv'd with figures strange and sweet,

All made out of the carver's brain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): Christabel. Part i.

Memory, the warder of the brain.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Macbeth. Act i. Sc. 7.

A man in all the world's new fashion planted,

That hath a mint of phrases in his brain.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Love's Labour's Lost. Act i. Sc. 1.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): Essay on Criticism. Part ii. Line 15.

For that fine madness still he did retain

Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.

Michael Drayton (1563-1631): (Said of Marlowe.) To Henry Reynolds, of Poets and Poesy.

With curious art the brain, too finely wrought,

Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought.

Charles Churchill (1731-1764): Epistle to William Hogarth. Line 645.

Oh, rather give me commentators plain,

Who with no deep researches vex the brain;

Who from the dark and doubtful love to run,

And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun.

George Crabbe (1754-1832): The Parish Register. Part i. Introduction.

  Doct.      Not so sick, my lord,

As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies,

That keep her from her rest.

  Macb.        Cure her of that.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

  Doct.        Therein the patient

Must minister to himself.

  Macb.  Throw physic to the dogs: I 'll none of it.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Macbeth. Act v. Sc. 3.