Date: 1740

"Some have said that the human Mind contained within it the Seeds of all Sciences; the Mind is indeed a Soil in which any of these Seeds may be sown, but it must be cultivated; and without an Husbandman it will continue a mere Tabula rasa, except what the Instincts write on it, without a p...

— Philalethes [pseud.]

Date: 1740

"Your Soul shall grow up as young Plants, and your Daughters be as the polished Corners of the Temple; and to sum up all Blessings in one,--Then shall the LORD be your GOD."

— Whitefield, George (1714-1770)

Date: 1741, 1742, 1755

"A Miracle that can be accounted for no other Way, than by what has been said above of the Legislator's principal Concern in the Support of the Doctrine; and of the deep Root it takes in the Mind of Man, when once it is received, by its agreeable Nature."

— Warburton, William (1698-1779)

Date: 1741

"Yet all Persons are under some Obligation to improve their own Understanding, otherwise it will be a barren Desart, or a Forest overgrown grown with Weeds and Brambles."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"I Might give another plain Simile to confirm the Truth of this [mnemonic method]. What Horse or Carriage can take up and bear away all the various, rude and unweildy Loppings of a branchy Tree at once? But if they are divided yet further so as to be laid close, and bound up in a more uniform Man...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1742

"Socrates, and other ancients, seem to have had particular pleasure in running a parallel between agriculture and the improvement of the mind: But in no respect does the comparison or likeness hold more exactly than in this, that as the ground must be properly prepared for the reception and nouri...

— Turnbull, George (1698-1748)

Date: 1742

"Instruction will be but thrown away, it cannot sink into the mind, or take firm root there, so as to fructify, if the mind be not pure and clean, pliable, or docile and open to truth and knowledge, but will quickly be chocked by the opposite illiberal temperature"

— Turnbull, George (1698-1748)

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: 1742

"The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1744

"I shall, having now crack'd the Shell of my Spleen against the Town, come to the Kernel of Reason, and present 'em this little sweet Nut of theirs, worm-eaten to the Sight, imbitter'd to their Taste, and abhorr'd to their Imaginations, as Shakespear terms it."

— Garrick, David (1717-1779)