Date: 1754

"If we consider them like materials, for so they may be considered likewise, employed to raise the fabric of our intellectual system, they will appear like mud, and straw, and lath, materials fit to erect some frail, and homely cottage, but not of substance, nor value sufficient for the construct...

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

Date: 1754

"The mind of man does often what princes and states have done. It gives a currency to brass and copper coined in the several philosophical and theological mints, and raises the value of gold and silver above that of their true standard."

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

Date: 1754

"Bred to think as well as speak by rote, they furnish their minds, as they furnish their houses or cloath their bodies, with the fancies of other men, and according to the mode of the age and country."

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

Date: 1755

"Thy answer is in more than words express'd, / I read it through the window in thy breast"

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1758

"Do not variegate the Structure of your Walls with Eubaean and Spartan Stone: but adorn both the Minds of the Citizens, and of those who govern them, by the Grecian Education."

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1759

"The minds of the Schoolmen were almost as much cloistered as their bodies; they had but little learning, and few books."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"Even this Piece of Wisdom did not find its Way into his Mind by Reflexion (that Passage for its Entrance had long been too closely barricadoed), but came in at his Eyes, and engaged his constant Counsellors, his Inclinations, on the Side of a fair Object he had accidentally beheld, at the House ...

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768)

Date: 1759

Imitators of Nature are "Searchers into the inmost Labyrinths of the human Mind"

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768)

Date: 1759, performed 1776

The soul may be "Snatch'd by the power of music from her cell / Of fleshly thraldom" and feel "herself upborn / On plumes of ecstasy"

— Mason, William (1725-1797)

Date: 1759

"[A]nd her Mind, at that time, might be likened to a Theatre, on which the Tragedy of a glittering Cross, and a Pair of Diamond Ear-rings, was acting, with much more Propriety than the envious Critic called Othello The Tragedy of the Handkerchief."

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768)