Date: Tuesday, August 14, 1753

"But from the opposite errour, from torpid despondency, can come no advantage; it is the frost of the soul, which binds up all its powers, and congeals life in perpetual sterility."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1754

"Thus my Conscience being tossed in the Waves of a scrupulous Mind, and partly Despair to have any other Issue than I had already by this Lady now my Wife, it behoved me further to consider the State of this Realm, and the Danger it stood in for lack of a Prince to succeed me."

— Lennox, née Ramsay, (Barbara) Charlotte (1730/1?-1804)

Date: 1754, 1762

"While private resentment was boiling in his sullen, unsociable mind, he heard the nation resound with complaints against the duke; and he met with the remonstrance of the commons, in which his enemy was represented as the cause of every national grievance, and as the great enemy of the public."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1755

"The Observations to be made, by that Means, refine the Understanding and improve the Judgment, as something is to be gathered from the various Dispositions of People in the highest and lowest Stations of Life; which Persons of Reflection may render greatly con|ducive, in clearing and purging the...

— Charke [née Cibber; other married name Sacheverell], Charlotte [alias Mr Brown] (1713-1760)

Date: 1755

"Now if the human understanding be, essentially and originally, a tabula rasa, susceptible of impression from the occurrence of every casual object, then the ideas it receives thereby will be the fountain, and, as it were, the materials of all its future proficiencies; and the number and e...

— Sharp, William, Vicar of Long Burton

Date: 1757

"The tossing of the sea remains after the storm; and when this remain of horror has entirely subsided, all the passion, which the accident raised, subsides along with it; and the mind returns to its usual state of indifference"

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1757

"If we can direct the lights we derive from such exalted speculations, upon the humbler field of the imagination, whilst we investigate the springs and trace the course of our passions, we may not only communicate to the taste a sort of philosophical solidity, but we may reflect back on severer s...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1758

"A Soul conversant with Virtue, resembles a perpetual Fountain: for it is clear, and gentle, and potable, and sweet, and communicative, and rich, and harmless, and innocent."

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1758

"If, therefore, you would be a musical and harmonious Person, whenever, in Parties of Drinking, the Soul is bedewed with Wine, suffer her not to go forth, and defile herself [like a snail]."

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1759

"Our sense of the horror and dreadful atrocity of such conduct, the delight which we take in hearing that it was properly punished, the indignation which we feel when it escapes this due retaliation, our whole sense and feeling, in short, of its ill desert, of the propriety and fitness of inflict...

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)