Date: 1775

"[B]e assured I throw the original from my heart as easily!"

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)

Date: 1775

"That heart, by war and honour steel'd to fear, / Droops on a sigh, and sickens at a tear!"

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)

Date: 1777

"Not like a cloyster'd drone, to read and doze, / In undeserving, undeserv'd repose; / But reason's influence to diffuse; to clear / The enlighten'd world of every gloomy fear; / Dispel the mists of error, and unbind / Those pedant chains that clog the freeborn mind."

— Lyttleton, George, 1st Baron Lyttleton (1709-1773)

Date: February 24, 1777; 1781

"She is the deceitful sorceress who now holds your husband's heart in bondage."

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)

Date: 1789

"In no state of society can a practice, involving in it circumstances of such atrocious and enormous guilt, be considered as defensible by any person whose understanding is not darkened by the turpitude of his heart; in whom not only the feelings of the moral sense are extinguished, but, in this ...

— Belsham, William (1752-1827)

Date: 1789

"Hope and fear are the two grand springs by which that curious machine, the human mind, is actuated; and to deprive Virtue of that support which she receives from their influence and operation, and to substitute in their room a sense of honour, or a love of moral beauty and order, is to betray th...

— Belsham, William (1752-1827)

Date: 1789

"A river may as soon be made to flow back to its fountain, as volitions can be exempted from the necessitating influence of motives."

— Belsham, William (1752-1827)

Date: 1789

"[I]t follows that motives, volitions, and actions, are all the definite effects of definite causes, and that they are all links of that // ---- "golden everlasting chain, / Whose strong embrace holds heaven, and earth, and main."

— Belsham, William (1752-1827)

Date: 1789

"But if it means the mental energy preceding and producing volition, it is then plainly equivalent to the term motive, and the question is reduced to a mere verbal controversy; for this mental energy, denoting only a particular disposition and state of mind, must itself have resulted from a previ...

— Belsham, William (1752-1827)