Date: January 28, 1753

"I have heard that his understanding was rather hurt by the absolute retirement in which he lived, and indeed he had an imagination too lively to be trusted to itself; the treasures of it were inexhaustible, but for want of commerce with mankind he made that rich oar into bright but useless medal...

— Montagu [née Robinson], Elizabeth (1718-1800)

Date: 1753

"Tho' this letter was somewhat shorter than those she usually wrote to him, yet the few lines it contain'd discovered, without her designing to do so, such a well establish'd fund of tenderness in her soul, as cannot but be discernable to every understanding reader."

— Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza (1693?-1756)

Date: 1754

"Our souls are stampt with God's own image, to this very end, that we should give them in tribute to him, by perfect love: 'render then to God the things that are God's'; by daily offering your whole souls up to him, by fervent acts of love; and you shall have given him your gold."

— Challoner, Richard (1691-1781)

Date: 1754

"This now, whereof we have taken some view in several of its branches, is that noble fund of ideas from whence all our intellectual riches are derived."

— 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

"Ideas and notions are the money of wise men, and they pay with these; whilst they mark and compute, with words, the money of fools."

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

Date: 1754

"But yet so difficult is the intellectual commerce, so narrow the intellectual fund, that the wisest men are frequently obliged to employ their money like counters, and their counters like money, in one case, however, without loss, in the other without fraud. We may be said to do the first, that ...

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

Date: 1755

"They George's Image in his Coin approve, / Thy pictur'd Mind I in thy Letters love."

— Masters, Mary (1694-1771)

Date: 1758

"Such a one is the Person, who ought to be publicly lamented, for the Misfortunes into which he is fallen: not, by Heaven, either he who is born or dies; but he, whom it hath befallen while he lives to lose what is properly his own: not his paternal Possessions, his paultry Estate, or his House, ...

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1759

"That is, let not great Examples, or Authorities, browbeat thy Reason into too great a diffidence of thyself: Thyself so reverence as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad; such borrowed riches make us poor."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)