Date: 1742, 1777

"Let me consult my own passions and inclinations. In them must I read the dictates of nature; not in your frivolous discourses."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1742, 1777

"Human minds are smaller streams, which, arising at first from the ocean [of Divintity], seek still, amid all wanderings, to return to it, and to lose themselves in that immensity of perfection"

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: w. December 1742, 1760

"Honour erected in thy breast its throne, / And kind Humanity was all thy own."

— Hamilton, William, of Bangour (1704-1754)

Date: w. 1739, 1742

"Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind."

— Collins, William (1721-1759)

Date: 1742

As an artist pours and extracts gold from a mold, "So virtuous Education forms the Mind, / And leaves for Life the beauteous Stamp behind!"

— Boyse, Samuel (1708-1749)

Date: 1742

"Where heav'nly Reason with her temperate Light, / Teaches th'unbiass'd Mind to judge aright / There Property secure enjoys her own; / There Conscience sits untroubl'd on her Throne"

— Boyse, Samuel (1708-1749)

Date: 1742

"The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1742

"Surely then no mistakes are ever committed in this affair; but every man, however dissolute and negligent, proceeds in the pursuit of happiness, with as unerring a motion, as that which the celestial bodies observe, when, conducted by the hand of the Almighty, they roll along the ethereal plains."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1742

"Like many subordinate artists, employed to form the several wheels and springs of a machine: Such are those who excel in all the particular arts of life."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1742

"Proceed to learn the just value of every pursuit; long study is not requisite: Compare, though but for once, the mind to the body, virtue to fortune, and glory to pleasure."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)