Date: 1714

"Was our Reason given / For such a Use! to be thus puff'd about / Like a dry Leaf, an idle Straw, a Feather, / The Sport of every whifling Blast that blows?"

— Rowe, Nicholas (1674-1718)

Date: 1735

"That Thought romantic Memory detains / In unknown cells and in aereal chains; / Imagination thence her flow'rs translates, / And Fancy emulous of God, creates."

— Harte, Walter (1708/9-1774)

Date: 1737

"When the luxuriant Ardour of his Youth / Succeeding Years had tam'd to better Growth, / And seem'd to break the Body's Crust away, / To give th'expanded Mind more Room to play; / Which, in its Evening, open'd on the Sight / Surprizing Beams of full Meridian Light, / As thrifty of its Splendor it...

— Hughes, Jabez (1685-1731)

Date: 1737, 1743

"We should manage our Thoughts in composing a Poem, as Shepherds do their Flowers in making a Garland; first select the Choicest, and then dispose them in the most proper places, where they give a Lusture to each other: Like the Feathers in Indian Crowns, which are so managed that every one refle...

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1741

"I Might give another plain Simile to confirm the Truth of this [mnemonic method]. What Horse or Carriage can take up and bear away all the various, rude and unweildy Loppings of a branchy Tree at once? But if they are divided yet further so as to be laid close, and bound up in a more uniform Man...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1744

"I shall, having now crack'd the Shell of my Spleen against the Town, come to the Kernel of Reason, and present 'em this little sweet Nut of theirs, worm-eaten to the Sight, imbitter'd to their Taste, and abhorr'd to their Imaginations, as Shakespear terms it."

— Garrick, David (1717-1779)

Date: Saturday, December 21, 1751

"A careless glance upon a favourite author, or transient survey of the varieties of life, is sufficient to supply the first hint or seminal idea, which, enlarged by the gradual accretion of matter stored in the mind, is by the warmth of fancy easily expanded into flowers, and sometimes ripened in...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, February 12, 1751

"There are many diseases both of the body and mind, which it is far easier to prevent than to cure, and therefore I hope you will think me employed in an office not useless either to learning or virtue, if I describe the symptoms of an intellectual malady, which, though at first it seizes only th...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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)

Date: 1762

"An idle mind, like fallow ground, is the soil for every weed to grow in; in it vice strengthens, the seed of every vanity flourishes unmolested and luxuriant; discontent, malignity, ill humour, spread far and wide, and the mind becomes a chaos, which it is beyond human power to call into order a...

— Scott [née Robinson], Sarah (1720-1795)