Date: 1767

"The vacancy he found in his heart was insupportable."

— Sheridan [née Chamberlaine], Frances (1724-1766)

Date: 1767

"Whilst he endeavoured to fill up the vacuity he found in his mind, his time was spent at best but in a sort of insipid tranquillity. The voluptuary has no taste for mental pleasures."

— Sheridan [née Chamberlaine], Frances (1724-1766)

Date: 1767

"Imagination is that faculty whereby the mind not only reflects on its own operations, but which assembles the various ideas conveyed to the understanding by the canal of sensation, and treasured up in the repository of the memory, compounding or disjoining them at pleasure; and which, by its pla...

— Duff, William (1732-1815)

Date: 1768

"No doubt the ocean fills the mind with vast ideas."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1770-1

"By this time the choleric vapours, which madam had jogged downwards when she let her broad bottom salute the chair with such a whack, growing warm amongst the hodg-potch they found in her store-room, which we may properly stile a hot-house, began to ascend, and take possession of their former te...

— Bridges, Thomas (b. 1710?, d. in or after 1775)

Date: 1771

"He thinks nothing more absurd than the common notion of Instruction, as if Science were to be poured into the Mind, like water into a cistern, that passively waits to receive all that comes."

— Harris, James (1709-1780)

Date: 1771, 1776

"Adieu, ye lays, that fancy's flowers adorn, / The soft amusement of the vacant mind!"

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: December 14, 1770; 1771

"He examines his own mind, and perceives there nothing of that divine inspiration, with which, he is told, so many others have been favoured. He never travelled to Heaven to gather new ideas; and he finds himself possessed of no other qualifications than what mere common sense and a plain underst...

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: 1755, 1771

"The passions then all human virtue give, / Fill up the soul, and lend her strength to live."

— Cawthorn, James (1719-1761)

Date: 1771

"A small stock of ideas is more easily managed, and sooner displayed than a great quantity crowded together."

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)