Date: 1691

"And I hope you'll find 'em both, seeing Man is naturally an Inquisitive Creature, continually hankering after Novelties; and though for the most part a meer Stranger at home, regardless of the Geography of his own Breast, (as I shall shew in a Treatise entituled, A Map of Man: Or, Vander in Mina...

— Dunton, John (1659–1732)

Date: Licens'd Decemb. 22. 1691

"She had proceeded thus far in a maze of Thought, when she started to find her self so lost to her Reason, and would have trod back again that path of deluding Fancy."

— Congreve, William (1670-1729)

Date: 1692

"In like manner he thought some Ribs of Grashoppers would be acceptable to many, whose Brains are full of those skipping Animals, to cause a Spring in their own Meadows."

— Gildon, Charles (1665-1724)

Date: 1709

"That fatal Night the Duke felt hostile Fires in his Breast, Love was entred with all his dreadful Artillery; he took possession in a moment of the Avenues that lead to the Heart! neither did the resistance he found there serve for any thing but to make his Conquest more illustrious."

— Manley, Delarivier (c. 1670-1724)

Date: 1752

"Upon the whole, however, she past a miserable and sleepless Night, her gentle Mind torn and distracted with various and contending Passions, distressed with Doubts, and wandring in a kind of Twilight, which presented her only Objects of different Degrees of Horrour, and where black Despair close...

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: 1760-7

"Indeed there is one thing to be considered, that in Nova Zembla, North Lapland, and in all those cold and dreary tracts of the globe, which lie more directly under the artick and antartick circles,--where the whole province of a man's concernments lies for near nine months together, withi...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"But the heat gradually increasing, and in a few seconds more getting beyond the point of all sober pleasure, and then advancing with all speed into the regions of pain,--the soul of Phutatorius, together with all his ideas, his thoughts, his attention, his imagination, judgment, resolution, deli...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1800

"My path was already chalked out, and my fancy now pursued it with uncommon pleasure."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

"Every sense was an inlet of pleasure, because it was an avenue to knowledge; and my soul brooded over the world of ideas, and glowed with exultation at the grandeur and beauty of its own creations"

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: March 1843

"The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)