Date: 1704

"All endeavours must be therefore used, either to divert, bind up, stupify, fluster, and amuse the senses, or else, to justle them out of their stations; and while they are either absent, or otherwise employed, or engaged in a civil war against each other, the spirit enters and performs ...

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1735

"Love is a little, sly, designing Knave, / And meanly steals his Conquests o'er our Minds"

— Hildebrand, Jacob (1692/3-1739)

Date: 1792

One can "wage war" on his own heart and "conquer it, or perish"

— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)