Date: 1768

"But I could wish, continued I, to spy the nakedness of their hearts, and through the different disguises of customs, climates, and religion, find out what is good in them to fashion my own by--and therefore am I come."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1770

"Spontaneous joys, where nature has its play, / The soul adopts and owns their firstborn sway; / Lightly they frolic o'er the vacant mind, / Unenvied, unmolested, unconfined."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1775

"Our Author, who almost every where manifests a perfect knowledge in the anatomy of the human mind, proves his science more particularly in a passage of this Scene, by shewing a property in our natures which might have escaped any common dissecter of morals; and this is, our suffering, upon true ...

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1775

"That this is the sense in which our Poet meant this scene to be accepted, is fully evident from his representing both Richard and Richmond to have been asleep during the apparition, and therefore capable of receiving those notices in the mind's eye only, as Hamlet says; which intirely removes th...

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1775

"Momus well wished a window in every man's breast. Physiognomists pretend they can take a peep through the features of the face; but this is too abstruse a science to answer the general purposes of life; besides that education may render such knowledge doubtful, as in the case of Socrates."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1775

"There is a contagion in minds and manners, as well as in bodies, when corrupt."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1775

"But, as I have said before, I do not think that ethic philosophy can ever be a gainer, by overstraining the sinews of the human mind."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1775

The imagination in its fullest enjoyments becomes suspicious of its offspring, and doubts whether it has created or adopted

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)

Date: 1775

"If there be but one vicious mind in the Set, 'twill spread like a contagion--the action of their pulse beats to the lascivious movement of the jigg--their quivering, warm-breath'd sighs impregnate the very air--the atmosphere becomes electrical to love, and each amorous spark darts thro' every l...

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)

Date: 1775

The thunder of words may sour the "milk of human kindness" in the breast

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)