Date: 1757-9

"[N]o Sentence so severe / As this, my Mind, much less my Paper, stains"

— Duncombe, John (1729-1786) [Editor]

Date: 1757

"Since, therefore, the mind of man appears of so loose and unsteddy a contexture, that, even at present, when so many persons find an interest in continually employing on it the chissel and the hammer, yet are they not able to engrave theological tenets with any lasting impression; how much more ...

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: March 25, 1758

"Non, mon digne ami; ce n’est point sur quelques feuilles éparses qu’il faut aller chercher la loi de Dieu, mais dans le coeur de l’homme, où sa main daigna l’écrire. [It is not at all in a few sparse pages that we must seek for God's law, but in the human heart, where His hand deigned to write."

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)

Date: 1759

"That medling Ape Imitation, as soon as we come to years of Indiscretion (so let me speak), snatches the Pen, and blots out nature's mark of Separation, cancels her kind intention, destroys all mental Individuality"

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"All these particulars, I say, consider'd, why should it seem altogether impossible, that heaven's latest editions of the human mind may be the most correct, and fair."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"The way to be happy is to live according to nature, in obedience to that universal and unalterable law with which every heart is originally impressed; which is not written on it by precept, but engraven by destiny, not instilled by education, but infused at our nativity."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: September 1, 1759.

" Ideas are retained by renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away, and which new images are striving to obliterate."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1760

"A man this emptied and vacuated of self-conceit, these lines of natural pride, being blotted out, the soul is as a Tabula rasa, an unwritten table, to receive any impression of the law of God, that he pleases to put on it; and then his words are all plain to him that understandeth, and right to ...

— Binning, Hugh (1627-1653)

Date: 1760-7

"For the next two whole stages, no subject would go down, but the heavy blow he had sustain'd from the loss of a son, whom it seems he had fully reckon'd upon in his mind, and register'd down in his pocket-book, as a second staff for his old age, in case Bobby should fail him."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1761

"[M]any, therefore, may violate that rule of right, which the hand of the Almighty has written upon the living tablets of the heart"

— Hawkesworth, John (bap. 1720, d. 1773)