Date: 1760-7

"What a conjuncture was here lost! ... my uncle Toby in one of the finest dispositions for it in the world;--his head like a smoak-jack;--the funnel unswept, and the ideas whirling round and round about in it, all obfuscated and darkened over with fuliginous matter!"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"As for my uncle Toby, his smoak-jack had not made a dozen revolutions, before he fell asleep also. "

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"Corporal Trim's description had fired his imagination,--my uncle Toby could not shut his eyes."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"Whether they were above my uncle Toby's reason,--or contrary to it,-- or that his brain was like wet tinder, and no spark could possibly take hold,--or that it was so full of saps, mines, blinds, curtins, and such military disqualifications to his seeing clearly into Prignitz and Scroderus's doc...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1764

Whence from such lands each pleasing science flies, / That first excites desire and then supplies; / Unknown to them, when sensual pleasures cloy, / To fill the languid pause with finer joy; / Unknown those powers that raise the soul to flame, / Catch every nerve and vibrate through the frame."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1764

"In wild excess the vulgar breast takes fire, / Till, buried in debauch, the bliss expire."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1766

"Fancy leads the fetter'd senses / Captives to her fond controul; / Merit may have rich pretences, / But 'tis Fancy fires the soul."

— Cunningham, John (1729-1773)

Date: 1768

"In saying this, I was making not so much La Fleur's eloge, as my own, having been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so, till I die, being firmly persuaded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1768

"The fire caught--and the whole city, like the heart of one man, open'd itself to Love."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: January 19, 1791

"It is that new invented virtue, which your masters canonize, that led their moral hero constantly to exhaust the stores of his powerful rhetoric in the expression of universal benevolence; whilst his heart was incapable of harbouring one spark of common parental affection."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)