Date: 1756, 1766

"I will love thee therefore, O Lord, my strength; yea, I will love thee: and it ever shall be my heart's desire, that my soul may behold by faith in its self, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, able and ready to change it into the same image from glory to glory, reflected upon, and conveyed to...

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1756, 1766

From "the natural lights of our understanding" we have the highest reason to conclude we will be rewarded or punished in the afterlife

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1756, 1766

God may cast his "bright beams of light upon our souls, and irradiate our understandings with the rays of ... wisdom"

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1760

"Squire Groome is no national characteristic of England, but a general representative of any person of the three kingdoms, who likes horse-racing, drinking, &c. preferably to any other happiness; but why he should be the type of the English nation, I cannot see, and therefore leave it to the very...

— Macklin, Charles (1697-1797)

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

"[I]n the planet Mercury (belike) it may be so, if not better still for [the biographer];--for there the intense heat of the country, which is proved by computators, from its vicinity to the sun, to be more than equal to that of red hot iron,--must, I think, long ago have vitrified the bodies of ...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"But this, as I said above, is not the case of the inhabitants of this earth;--our minds shine not through the body, but are wrapt up here in a dark covering of uncrystalized flesh and blood; so that if we would come to the specifick characters of them, we must go some other way to work."

— 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

Ideas "follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"We should feel sorrow, says he, but not sink under its oppression; the heart of a wise man should resemble a mirrour, which reflects every object without being sullied by any."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)