Date: 1741

"Use all Diligence to acquire and treasure up a large Store of Ideas and Notions: Take every Opportunity to add something to your Stock; and by frequent Recollection fix them in your memory: Nothing tends to confirm and enlarge the Memory like a frequent Review of its Possessions."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"Where the Memory has been almost constantly employing itself in scraping together new Acquirements, and where there has not been a Judgment sufficient to distinguish what Things were fit to be recommended and treasured up in the Memory, and what things were idle, useless or needless, the Mind ha...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"A few useful Things perhaps, mixed and confounded with many Trifles and all manner of Rubbish fill up their Memories, and compose their intellectual Possessions. 'Tis a great Happiness therefore to distinguish things aright, and to lay up nothing in the Memory but what has some just Value in it,...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"But what Part of the Brain that is, wherein the Images of Things lie treasured up, is very hard for us to determine with Certainty. It is most probable that those very Fibres, Pores or Traces of the Brain, which assist at the first Idea or Perception of any Object, are the fame which assist also...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1742

"God beholds all souls bare, and stripped of these corporeal vessels, bark, and filth."

— Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180), Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), and James Moor (bap. 1712, d. 1779)

Date: 1745

"Such is the world Lorenzo's wisdom wooes, / And on its thorny pillow seeks repose; / A pillow which, like opiates ill-prepared, / Intoxicates, but not composes; fills / The visionary mind with gay chimeras, / All the wild trash of sleep, without the rest; / What unfeign'd travail, and what dream...

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1745

"Drink early then, my Friend, at Reason's Bowl, / And fill with wholesome Draughts thy youthful Soul. / If Wine or Gall the Recent Vessel stains, / Each Scent alike the faithful Cask retains."

— Whaley, John (bap. 1710, d. 1745)

Date: 1748, 1777

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas, furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: Tuesday, April 3, 1750

"He must fly from himself, either because he feels a tediousness in life from the equipoise of an empty mind, which, having no tendency to one motion more than another, but as it is impelled by some external power, must always have recourse to foreign objects; or he must be afraid of the intrusio...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Saturday, December 13, 1750

"The most important events, when they become familiar, are no longer considered with wonder or solicitude, and that which at first filled up our whole attention, and left no place for any other thought, is soon thrust aside into some remote repository of the mind, and lies among other lumber of t...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)