Date: 1748, 1749

"In the fair sex, the soul adapts itself to the delicacy of constitution: thence flow that tenderness, that affection, those lively sentiments founded rather upon passion than reason; and in fine, those prejudices and superstitions whose impression is so hard to be effaced."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"These are the animals, that resemble man the most; for we observe likewise amongst them the same gradual analogy, in relation to the callous body, in which Lancisi had placed the seat of the Soul, before the late Monsieur de la Peyronnie, who has illustrated this opinion with a variety of experi...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"All this knowledge therefore, the vanity of which puffs up the giddy brain of our supercilious pedants, is nothing but a vast heap of words and figures, which form in the head the traces by which we distinguish and remember objects."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Hurried with incessant rapidity by the vortex of blood and animal spirits, one undulation makes an impression, which is immediately effaced by another; the soul pursues it, but often in vain: she must wait to bewail the loss of what she did not quickly lay hold of; and thus it is that the imagin...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Such is the chaos, such the rapid and continual succession of our ideas; they drive one another successively, as one wave impels another; so that it the imagination does not employ a part of its muscles, poised as it were in an equilibrium upon the strings of the brain, so as to sustain itself s...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Man is fram'd of materials, not exceeding in value those of other animals; nature has made use of one and the same paste, she has only diversify'd the ferment in working it up."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"I mean that invigorating and impetuous principle which Hypocrates calls ενοϱμον or the soul. This principle exists and is seated in the brain at the point of origin of the nerves through which it exercises its rule over all the rest of the body."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: Tuesday, May 15, 1750

"Nor is fear, the most overbearing and resistless of all our passions, less to be temperated by this universal medicine of the mind."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Saturday, July 28, 1750

"Thus in time want is enlarged without bounds; an eagerness for increase of possessions deluges the soul, and we sink into the gulphs of insatiability, only because we do not sufficiently consider, that all real need is very soon supplied, and all real danger of its invasion easily precluded."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, August 28, 1750

"Sorrow is perhaps the only affection of the breast that can be expected from this general remark, and it therefore deserves the particular attention of those who have assumed the arduous province of preserving the balance of the mental constitution."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)