Date: Tuesday, November 1751

"As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs; so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, January 8, 1751

"It is necessary to that perfection of which our present state is capable, that the mind and body should both be kept in action; that neither the faculties of the one nor of the other be suffered to grow lax or torpid for want of use; that neither health be purchased by voluntary submission to ig...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, February 12, 1751

"The disproportions of absurdity grow less and less visible, as we are reconciled by degrees to the deformity of a mistress; and falsehood by long use, is assimilated to the mind, as poison to the body."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1751

"In this corps he remained three years, during which, he had no opportunity of seeing actual service, except at the affair of Glensheel; and this life of insipid quiet, must have hung heavy upon a youth of M---'s active disposition, had not he found exercise for the mind, in'reading books of amus...

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: September 7, 1751

"The mental disease of the present generation, is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, February 12, 1751

"There are many diseases both of the body and mind, which it is far easier to prevent than to cure, and therefore I hope you will think me employed in an office not useless either to learning or virtue, if I describe the symptoms of an intellectual malady, which, though at first it seizes only th...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, January 22, 1751

"It is, perhaps, not impossible to promote the cure of this mental malady, by close application to some new study, which may pour in fresh ideas, and keep curiosity in perpetual motion."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, January 22, 1751

"This is a formidable and obstinate disease of the intellect, of which, when it has once become radicated by time, the remedy is one of the hardest tasks of reason and of virtue."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: August 27, 1751

"It had been a task worthy of the moral philosophers to have considered with equal care [as physicians have traced in the body the "various periods of the constitution"] the climactericks of the mind; to have pointed out the time at which every passion begins and ceases to predominate, and noted ...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1752, 1790

A mind may be "soft, tho' bright, like her own eyes, / Discreetly witty, gayly wise."

— Jenyns, Soame (1704-1787)