Date: 1725-6

"This is spoken with too great severity: it is necessary to relieve the mind of the reader sometimes with gayer scenes, that it may proceed with a fresh appetite to the succeeding entertainment."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), Broome, W. and Fenton, E.

Date: 1725-6

"The moral then of these fables of Alcinous is, that a constant series of happiness intoxicates the mind, and that moderation is often learn'd in the school of adversity."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), Broome, W. and Fenton, E.

Date: 1725-6

"[T]his last astonishes the Reader, and he is so intent upon it, that he has not attention to consider the absurdity in the manner of Ulysses's landing: In this moment when [Homer] perceives the mind of the Reader as it were intoxicated with these beauties, he steals Ulysses on shore, and dismiss...

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), Broome, W. and Fenton, E.

Date: 1725-6

"Discourse [is] the sweeter banquet of the mind."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), Broome, W. and Fenton, E.

Date: 1726

"O! teach me what is Good! teach me thy self! / Save me from Folly, Vanity and Vice, / From every low Pursuit! and feed my Soul, / With Knowledge, conscious Peace, and Vertue pure, / Sacred, substantial, never-fading Bliss!"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: March 13, 1727

"And is not virtue in mankind / The nutriment that feeds the mind; / Upheld by each good action past, / And still continued by the last?"

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1733

"Nothing is more void of real improvement and instruction to the mind, and more fulsom, than heaps of quotations, and tedious disquisitions what opinions such and such men were of, in relation to matters properly determinable only by right reason and Scripture."

— Browne, Peter (d. 1735)

Date: 1733

"There St. John mingles with my friendly Bowl, / The Feast of Reason and the Flow of Soul."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1735-6

"See! the full board / That steams disgust, and bowls that give no joy; / No truth invited there, to feed the mind; / Nor wit, the wine-rejoicing reason quaffs."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1742, 1777

"Away then with all those vain pretences of making ourselves happy within ourselves, of feasting on our own thoughts, of being satisfied with the consciousness of well-doing, and of despising all assistance and all supplies from external objects."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)