Date: 1764

"Bold was the man, and fenc'd in ev'ry part /With oak, and ten-fold brass about the heart, / To build a play who tortur'd first his brain, / And then dar'd launch it on this stormy main."

— Murphy, Arthur (1727-1805)

Date: 1765

"Une pierre de marbre qui a des veines plutôt que d'une pierre de marbre tout unie ou de tablettes vides, c'est-à-dire de ce qui s'appelle tabula rasa chez les philosophes."

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765

"If all [the mind] had was the mere capacity to receive those items of knowledge--a passive power to do so, as indeterminate as the power of wax to receive shapes or of a blank page to receive words--it would not be the source of necessary truths"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765

"And bid the flame each heart refine, / As silver recent from the mine"

— Merrick, James (1720-1769)

Date: 1765

"To give a heart of triple steel / The Lord's humanity to feel"

— Smart, Christopher (1722-1771)

Date: 1765

"O Judah, if in this thy day / My Will thou purpose to obey, / Steel not thy breast to truths divine, / As erst the Fathers of thy line"

— Merrick, James (1720-1769)

Date: 1765

"I have also used the analogy of a veined block of marble, as opposed to an entirely homogenous block of marble, or to a blank tablet--what the philosophers call a tabula rasa"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765, 1770

"Wonder they cannot blush, they do not feel, / They must be harden'd like an heart of steel."

— Thompson, Edward (1738-1786)

Date: 1765

"For (strange) his soul's materializ'd to gold..... Thus we the stale philosophy renew, / That souls are mortal, and material too"

— Stevenson, William (1730-1783)

Date: 1765

"Yet, though the hardy, unreflecting heart / Glows in the chace, as flints are fir'd by steel ... That breast's not human which can never feel."

— Stevenson, William (1730-1783)