Date: 1754

"Such they may be called, for though foreign ideas divert the attention of the mind, when they break in unsought and by violence, they help it often when they have been sought and are admitted by choice."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1755

"They say this town is full of cozenage, / Drug-working sorcerers that change the mind; / Soul-killing witches that deform the body; / And many such like libertines of sin."

— Shakespeare [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"That souls of animals infuse themselves / Into the trunks of men"

— Shakespeare [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"I've seen thee stern, and thou hast oft beheld
Heart hardening spectacles"

— Shakespeare [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"Using those thoughts which should indeed have died
With them they think on."

— Shakespeare [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

A soul's thoughts may "perish in thinking"

— Locke [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"Dim, as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars / To lonely, weary, wand'ring travellers, / Is reason to the soul."

— Dryden [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"These prodigious conceits in nature spring out of framing abstracted conceptions, instead of those easy and primary notions which nature stamps alike in all men of common sense."

— Digby on Bodies [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"No constant reason of this can be given, but from the nature of man's mind, which hath this notion of a deity born with it, and stamped upon it; or is of such a frame, that in the free use of itself will find God."

— Tillotson [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

Man does not have "a power of stamping his best sentiments upon his memory in indelible characters"

— Watts [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]