Date: 1752

"You know, my Dear, how gloomy the Prospect was Yesterday before our Eyes, how inevitable Ruin stared me in the Face; and the dreadful Idea of having entailed Beggary on my Amelia and her Posterity racked my Mind."

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: 1752

"By the latter I shall see whether you can keep a Secret; and if it is no otherwise material, it will be a wholesome Exercise to your Mind; for the Practice of any Virtue is a kind of mental Exercise, and serves to maintain the Health and Vigour of the Soul."

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: 1753

The heart may be softened or wounded

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: Tuesday, March 20, 1753

"[I]t is to be regretted, therefore, that he did not exercise his mind less, and his body more: since by this means, it is highly probable, that though he would not then have astonished with the blaze of a comet, he would yet have shone with the permanent radiance of a fixed star."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, October 2, 1753

"Every other passion is alike simple and limited, if it be considered only with regard to the breast which it inhabits; the anatomy of the mind, as that of the body, must perpetually exhibit the same appearances; and though by the continued industry of successive inquirers, new movements will be ...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1754

Authors may "awaken the judgment to exert itself, so as to reject all the alluring bribes which the passions, assisted by the imagination, can offer"

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1754

"Mr. Locke, who has made a more exact dissection of the human mind than any man before him, declares he gained all his knowledge from consideration of himself."

— Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley [née Lady Mary Pierrepont] (1689-1762)

Date: 1754

"But the eye here made use of must be the mind's eye (as Shakespear, with his peculiar aptness of expression, calls it) and so strictly just is this metaphor, that nothing is apparently more frequent than a perverse shutting of this mental eye when we have not an inclination to perceive th...

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1754

"I know not likewise, why a short-sighted mind's eye should not be as good an expression as a short-sighted body's eye"

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1754

"But in this we are much kinder to our sense than to our intellect; for in order to assist the former we use glasses and spectacles of all kinds adapted to our deficiency of sight, whereas in the latter we are so far from accepting the assistance of mental glasses or spectacles, that we often str...

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)