Date: 1756

"Oh! my dear love, quick, quickly drive away / Those boding thoughts which on your quiet prey; / The breed of Fancy, gender'd in the brain, / Nurs'd by the grosser spirits, light, and vain; / The vagrant visions of the sleeping mind, / Which vanish wak'd, nor leave a mark behind."

— Bickerstaff, Isaac (b. 1733, d. after 1808)

Date: 1756

"Let then my soul and body be a-kin, / Naked without, as desolate within."

— Bickerstaff, Isaac (b. 1733, d. after 1808)

Date: 1757

"The mind of man has naturally a far greater alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in searching for differences; because by making resemblances we produce new images, we unite, we create, we enlarge our stock; but in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the imagi...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1757

"The term Taste, like all other figurative terms, is not extremely accurate: the thing which we understand by it, is far from a simple and determinate idea in the minds of most men, and it is therefore liable to uncertainty and confusion."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1760-7

"That had said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observ'd all her motions,--her machinations;--tra...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

Wit and judgment "in this world never go together; inasmuch as they are two operations differing from each other as wide as east is from west.--So, says Locke,--so are farting and hickuping, say I."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"[A]n illustration is no argument,--nor do I maintain the wiping of a looking-glass clean, to be a syllogism;--but you all, may it please your worships, see the better for it,--so that the main good these things do, is only to clarify the understanding, previous to the application of the argument...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

The "conscience of a man, by long habits of sin, might (as the scripture assures it may) insensibly become hard;--and, like some tender parts of his body, by much stress and continual hard usage, lose, by degrees, that nice sense and perception with which God and nature endow'd it"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

In Catholicism a man's conscience could not possibly continue for long blinded;--"three times in a year, at least, he must go to confession."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"Will that restore [the conscience] to sight, quoth my uncle Toby?"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)