Date: September 1, 1759.

"The incursions of troublesome thoughts are often violent and importunate; and it is not easy to a mind accustomed to their inroads to expel them immediately by putting better images into motion; but this enemy of quiet is above all others weakened by every defeat; the reflection which has been o...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: September 1, 1759.

"Employment is the great instrument of intellectual dominion."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: September 1, 1759.

"The mind cannot retire from its enemy into total vacancy, or turn aside from one object but by passing to another."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: December 29, 1759

"If the senses were feasted with perpetual pleasure, they would always keep the mind in subjection."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: December 29, 1759

"But as we advance forward into the crowds of life, innumerable delights sollicit our inclinations, and innumerable cares distract our attention; the time of youth is passed in noisy frolicks; manhood is led on from hope to hope, and from project to project; the dissoluteness of pleasure, the ine...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: December 29, 1759

"In childhood, while our minds are yet unoccupied, religion is impressed upon them, and the first years of almost all who have been well educated are passed in a regular discharge of the duties of piety."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1759

"Their grief, however, like their joy, was transient; every thing floated in their mind unconnected with the past or future, so that one desire easily gave way to another, as a second stone cast into the water effaces and confounds the circles of the first."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: January 12, 1760

"To fix deeply in the mind the principles of science, to settle their limitations, and deduce the long succession of their consequences; to comprehend the whole compass of complicated systems, with all the arguments, objections, and solutions, and to reposite in the intellectual treasury the numb...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: May 13, 1761

"In all my Enna's beauties blest, / Amidst profusion still I pine; / For though she gives me up her breast, / Its panting tenant is not mine."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: w. 1762-3, published 1950

"Lord Elibank has just a cabinet of curiosities [in his mind], which are well ranged and of which he has an exact catalogue."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)