Date: 1765

"Reason in the bosom pours, / Its growth improves, its fruit matures, / Each counsel of the human brain / Weighs in his scale, and stamps it vain?"

— Merrick, James (1720-1769)

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

"Are your thoughts by Justice sway'd, / And in Reason's balance weigh'd?"

— Merrick, James (1720-1769)

Date: 1765

"A Man's House may be so fill'd with Furniture, that he shall want Room to stir; and a Man's Head may be so stuff'd with other People's Thoughts, that his own shall be stifled."

— Anonymous

Date: 1765

"I am apt to think that as Plants are choak'd with too much Moisture, and Lamps with too much Oil; so it happens to the Mind of Man, when it is embarass'd with too much Study and Matter; for being confounded with a great Variety of Things, it loses the Power of extricating itself, and so is rende...

— Anonymous

Date: 1765

"Human Reason and Discourses, are like a confus'd and barren Matter, until the Grace of God puts them in form, which alone gives them Shape and Value."

— Anonymous

Date: 1765, 1770

"Passions, and snow balls each by motion swell, / And Kitty finds her little heart rebel; / Full of desires she sighs for this, and that, / Her heart for ev'ry man goes pit-a-pat."

— Thompson, Edward (1738-1786)

Date: 1765, 1770

"We've some of hotter, some of colder make, / And some whose drowsy passions never wake."

— Thompson, Edward (1738-1786)

Date: 1765, 1770

"This is the man who first impeach'd his friend, / And on his ruin rose, yet could not lend / One cobweb virtue from his scurvy soul, / Which sins by study, and without controul."

— Thompson, Edward (1738-1786)

Date: 1765

"Those objects that assimilate the taste / To Nature's standard, ever rightly plac'd; / Stamp on the passive heart each soft impress"

— Stevenson, William (1730-1783)