Date: 1765

"If all [the mind] had was the mere capacity to receive those items of knowledge--a passive power to do so, as indeterminate as the power of wax to receive shapes or of a blank page to receive words--it would not be the source of necessary truths"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765

"I have also used the analogy of a veined block of marble, as opposed to an entirely homogenous block of marble, or to a blank tablet--what the philosophers call a tabula rasa"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765

"What Sculpture is to a Block of Marble, Education is to a human Soul."

— Anonymous

Date: 1765

"And as the richest Diamond cannot shoot forth its Lustre, wanting the Lapidary's Skill; so will the latent Virtues of the noblest Mind be bury'd in Obscurity if not call'd forth by Precept, and the Rules of good Manners."

— Anonymous

Date: 1766

"I know not whether the remark is to our honour or otherwise, that the lessons of wisdom have never such a power over us, as when they are wrought into the heart, through the ground-work of a story which engages the passions: Is it that we are like iron, and must first be heated before we can be ...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1767

"Imitation indeed, of every kind, except that of nature, has a tendency to cramp the inventive powers of the mind, which, if indulged in their excursions, might discover new mines of intellectual ore, that lie hid only from those who are incapable or unwilling to dive into the recesses in which i...

— Duff, William (1732-1815)

Date: 1767

"The mines of Fancy not having been opened before his time, are left to be digged by him; and the treasures they contain become his own, by a right derived from the first discovery. The whole system of nature, and the whole region of fiction, yet unexplored by others, is subjected to his survey, ...

— Duff, William (1732-1815)

Date: 1774

"The attraction of the magnet is only exerted upon similar particles; and to taste the beauties of Homer it is requisite to partake his fire: but every one can relish the author who represents common life, because every one can refer to the originals from whence his ideas were taken"

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1774

"Fancy throws out both the worthless earth and the rich ore; judgment, like a skilful refiner, distinguishes the one from the other, and purifies the gold contained in the latter, from the dross with which it is intermingled."

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: December 10, 1774; 1775

"The fire of the artist's own genius operating upon these materials which have been thus diligently collected, will enable him to make new combinations, perhaps, superior to what had ever before been in the possession of the Art. / / As in the mixture of the variety of metals, which are said to h...

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)