Date: 1737, 1743

"It is not so much the being exempt from Faults, as the having overcome them, that is an Advantage to us; it being with the Follies of the Mind as with the Weeds of a Field, which, if destroyed and consumed upon the place of their Birth, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung the...

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1740

"To the instructed Man [Ideas of Sensation] afford a vast Quantity of Materials to exercise Knowledge on, but without being taught that [end page 26] Knowledge to apply them to artificial Purposes, they would signify no more to us, besides assisting the Instincts to take Care of that Body they we...

— Philalethes [pseud.]

Date: 1741

"Yet all Persons are under some Obligation to improve their own Understanding, otherwise it will be a barren Desart, or a Forest overgrown grown with Weeds and Brambles."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"Their Understandings are hereby cooped up in narrow Bounds, so that they never look abroad into other Provinces of the intellectual World, which are more beautiful perhaps and more fruitful than their own."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1744

"TRAGEDY and COMEDY; the first fixes her Empire on the Passions, and the more exalted Contractions and Dilations of the Heart; the last, tho' not inferior (quotidem Science) holds her Rule over the less enobled Qualities and Districts of human Nature, which are call'd the Humours."

— Garrick, David (1717-1779)

Date: 1748, 1777

"Chaced from the open country, these robbers [i.e., superstitions] fly into the forest, and lie in wait to break in upon every unguarded avenue of the mind, and overwhelm it with religious fears and prejudices."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: Tuesday, March 27, 1750

"The task of an author is, either to teach what is not known, or to recommend known truths by his manner of adorning them; either to let new light in upon the mind, and open new scenes to the prospect, or to vary the dress and situation of common objects, so as to give them fresh grace and more p...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Saturday, September 15, 1750

"The first effect of this meditation is, that it furnishes a new employment for the mind, and engages the passions on remoter objects; as kings have sometimes freed themselves from a subject too haughty to be governed and too powerful to be crushed, by posting him in a distant province, till his ...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, October 2, 1750

"[T]hough I do not pretend to give laws to the legislators of mankind, or to limit the range of those powerful minds that carry light and heat through all the regions of knowledge, yet I have long thought, that the greatest part of those who lose themselves in studies by which I have not found th...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1751, 1777

"There seems here a necessity for confessing that the happiness and misery of others are not spectacles entirely indifferent to us; but that the view of the former, whether in its causes or effects, like sun-shine or the prospect of well-cultivated plains, (to carry our pretensions no higher), co...

— Hume, David (1711-1776)