Date: 1754

"She put me upon recollecting the giddy scene, which those dreadfully interesting ones that followed it, had made me wish to blot out of my memory."

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1754

"I wish this ugly word foreign were blotted out of my vocabulary; out of my memory, rather"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1754

"Proceed, child, your mind is the unsullied book of nature: Turn to another Leaf"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1754

"Sir Charles Grandison's heart is the book of heaven-- May I not study it?"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1754

"And so Dr. Edwards remarks of Socinus, that Adam, according to Him, had only the Faculty of Understanding, but none of the Accomplishments of it: His Mind being a pure rasa tabula, capable indeed of any Impressions, but having no Characters of Wisdom engraven upon it, by the Finger of God, when ...

— Holloway, Benjamin (1690/1-1759)

Date: 1754, 1793

"All-perfect Wisdom, on each living soul, / Engrav'd this mandate, 'to preserve their frame, And hold entire the gen'ral orb of being.'"

— Blacklock, Thomas (1721-1791)

Date: 1754

"The human soul is so far from being furnished with forms and ideas to perceive all things by, or from being impregnated, I would rather say than printed over, with the seeds of universal knowledge, that we have no ideas till we receive passively the ideas of sensible qualities from without."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1755

A stamp may be settled deep into the mind

— Locke [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

"These simple ideas, offered to the mind, the understanding can no more refuse, nor alter, nor blot out, than a mirrour can refuse, alter, or obliterate, the images which the objects produce"

— Locke [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1755

Heads overfull of matter, be like pens over full of ink, which will sooner blot, than make any fair letters at all.

— Ascham's Schoolmaster [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]