Date: 1759

"To the mind, as to the eye, it is difficult to compare with exactness objects vast in their extent, and various in their parts."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1759

"Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1759

"Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye, and while we glide along the stream of time, whatever we leave behind us is always lessening, and that which we approach increasing in magnitude."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: December 29, 1759

"If the senses were feasted with perpetual pleasure, they would always keep the mind in subjection."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1760-7

"That had said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observ'd all her motions,--her machinations;--tra...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

Wit and judgment "in this world never go together; inasmuch as they are two operations differing from each other as wide as east is from west.--So, says Locke,--so are farting and hickuping, say I."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"[A]n illustration is no argument,--nor do I maintain the wiping of a looking-glass clean, to be a syllogism;--but you all, may it please your worships, see the better for it,--so that the main good these things do, is only to clarify the understanding, previous to the application of the argument...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

The "conscience of a man, by long habits of sin, might (as the scripture assures it may) insensibly become hard;--and, like some tender parts of his body, by much stress and continual hard usage, lose, by degrees, that nice sense and perception with which God and nature endow'd it"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

In Catholicism a man's conscience could not possibly continue for long blinded;--"three times in a year, at least, he must go to confession."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"Will that restore [the conscience] to sight, quoth my uncle Toby?"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)