Date: 1775

"To the mere novice in philosophical investigations, it will appear impossible to reduce all the variety of thinking to so simple and uniform a process; but to the same person it would also appear impossible a priori, that all the varieties of language, as spoken by all the nations in the world, ...

— Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804)

Date: 1776

" A father, husband, brother sorrowing weep, / Whose hearts engraven thy fair virtues keep."

— Shaw, Cuthbert (1738-1771)

Date: 1776-1789

"Such a festival must indeed have degenerated, in a wealthy and despotic empire, into a theatrical representation; but it was at least a comedy well worthy of a royal audience, and which might sometimes imprint a salutary lesson on the mind of a young prince."

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1776-1789

"These convenient maxims of reverence and implicit faith were doubtless imprinted with care on the tender minds of youth"

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1776

"The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, who have made such a great progress in the sciences, were not actuated by supernatural causes, or any innate principles in their original formation; the mind is a mere blank, but capable of receiving such impressions as custom, education, or any other relative c...

— Gwynn, John (bap. 1713, d. 1786)

Date: 1777, 1778

"The mind of youth is a kind of tabula rasa;--at first unstained with guilt, and unadorned with virtue."

— Rack, Edmund (1735-1787)

Date: 1777, 1778

"May the fair page never be polluted!--may it become inscribed with every excellent virtue--and be thereby rendered comely in the sight of Men, of Angels, of the Deity!"

— Rack, Edmund (1735-1787)

Date: 1779, 1794

"Upon the back of each bright heart / These words engraven were [literally], / In mystic characters; fond Love / And joy have fix'd me here."

— Whalley, Thomas Sedgwick (1746-1828)

Date: 1780

"And tell our hearts the thing shall be, / And seal it on our conscience now!"

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1781

"Ideas of sense are but the first elements of thought: and the produce raised from these elements by the operation of the mind upon them is as far superiour to the elements themselves in variety, copiousness and use, as books are to the characters of which they are composed."

— Rotheram, John (1725–1789)