Date: 1769

"What gratitude do we not owe to heaven! may the sense of it be for ever engraven on our hearts!"

— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)

Date: 1771

"For were that mind, what some suppose, a mere tabula rasa upon its first coming into the world, a pure and perfect blank, without one single impression; who can deny that it would be right, that it would be humane and wise, to make, in the earliest moments, those impressions upon it, whic...

— Dodd, William (1729-1777)

Date: 1774

The mind, "With not a character engrav'd, presents / One universal blank."

— Roberts, William Hayward (d. 1791)

Date: 1781

"Ideas of sense are but the first elements of thought: and the produce raised from these elements by the operation of the mind upon them is as far superiour to the elements themselves in variety, copiousness and use, as books are to the characters of which they are composed."

— Rotheram, John (1725–1789)

Date: 1782

"The wise philosopher tells us, that the soul of man is rasa tabula, like a white sheet of paper, out of which it must be more than common art to erase the first impressions"

— Grose, John (bap. 1758, d. 1821)

Date: 1788

"The parson frank'd their souls to kingdom-come!"

— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)

Date: 1790

"'Tis God's decree engrav'd upon the heart / To make us wait with patience, till he comes, / Undraws the curtain, and dispels the gloom, / And takes us to his bosom, and rewards / Our constancy and truth."

— Hurdis, James (1763-1801)

Date: 1792

"[T]he heart's decisions" may be "stamp'd / By Nature's seal, and man's primæval laws"

— Polwhele, Richard (1760-1838)

Date: 1795

"The infant mind has been compared to a tabula rasa, or sheet of clean paper: but there is this essential difference, as hath been well observed, between the opposite objects of comparison they are not both equally Indifferent to the inscription which they are to bear."

— Napleton, John (1738/9-1817)

Date: 1804, 1816

"Of ink has for ever a flood, / To blacken a bosom of snow!"

— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)