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

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

— Anonymous

Date: 1766

"My fancy draws that harmless groupe as listening to every line of this with great composure."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1766

"Ev'n this my friend, its well known image here / Remains engraven by the hand of love: / My beating heart confirms it for the same."

— Williams, Anna (1708-1783)

Date: 1766

"If society be formed, by the communication of ideas and sentiments, speech, is, undoubtedly, its most essential and most graceful band, being, at once, the pencil of the mind, the image of its operations, and, the interpreter of the heart."

— Trusler, John (1735-1820)

Date: 1766

"These three words denote, equally, an advantageous state, and agreeable situation; but that of happiness, marks, properly, the state of fortune, capable of dispensing pleasures, and placing them within our reach; that of felicity, expresses, particularly, the state of the heart; disposed to tast...

— Trusler, John (1735-1820)

Date: 1766

"'Love', designs on the imagination, the flattering idea of eternal happiness, in the entire and constant possession of the object we 'love'. 'Gallantry', fails not to paint there the agreeable image of a singular pleasure, in the enjoyment of the object we pursue; but, neither the one, nor, the ...

— Trusler, John (1735-1820)

Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"Only this more. The ideas--my lodgers--are of all sorts. Some, gentlemen of the law, who pay me a great deal more than others. Divines of all sorts have been with me, and have ever disturbed me. When I first took up house, Presbyterian ministers used to make me melancholy with dreary tones. Meth...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1767, 1784

"Shall we, because we strive in vain to tell / How Matter acts on incorporeal Mind, / Or how, when sleep has lock'd up ev'ry sense, / Or fevers rage, Imagination paints / Unreal scenes, reject what sober sense, / And calmest thought attest?"

— Jago, Richard (1715-1781)

Date: 1768

"The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself and blackened; reduce them to their proper size and hue she overlooks them."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)