Date: 1770

"But all his serious thoughts had rest in Heaven. / As some tall cliff, that lifts its awful form, / Swells from the vale and midway leaves the storm, / Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, / Eternal sunshine settles on its head."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1776

"Besides, my Lucy is a perfect Columbus in the terra incognita of lovers hearts, and discovered her faithful Stanley's fond attachment in his speaking eyes, for many months before his tongue revealed it."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1776

"Not that I wou'd encourage the modern philosophy, which reduces all virtue to self-interest; for if I may hazard an unborrowed simile, the liberal mind may be compared to the Nile, which enriches the soil, from its own abundance, without requiring any return."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1776

"Would it were passed, and that like Aetna, though my bosom flamed, my head was crowned with snow."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1790

"This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1790

"But those who will stand upon that elevation of reason, which places centuries under our eye, and brings things to the true point of comparison, which obscures little names, and effaces the colours of little parties, and to which nothing can ascend but the spirit and moral quality of human actio...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: November 19, 1793

"The mind, freed from her weighty companion, roams at large through the regions of fancy; and at once conceives and invents, beautifies and illustrates, amplifies and adorns."

— Boyd, Hugh (1746-1794)

Date: 1798

"On the contrary, if, to entice him to enter the paths of knowledge, we strew them with flowers, how will he feel when he must force his way through thorns and briars?"

— Edgeworth, Maria