Date: 1748, 1777

"Our mental vision or conception of ideas is nothing but a revelation made to us by our Maker."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748, 1777

"Inference and reasoning concerning the operations of nature would, from that moment, be at an end; and the memory and senses remain the only canals, by which the knowledge of any real existence could possibly have access to the mind."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748, 1777

"They know, that a human body is a mighty complicated machine: That many secret powers lurk in it, which are altogether beyond our comprehension: That to us it must often appear very uncertain in its operations: And that therefore the irregular events, which outwardly discover themselves, can be ...

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748

"There is nothing more certain, that that there are two Kinds of Conviction, one flowing from a sudden and violent breaking-in of Truth, when the Understanding is as it were taken by Storm, and a Man's whole System of Thinking is changed in an Instant: the other a gradual, gentle, and slow steali...

— Anonymous; [Lyttleton]

Date: 1748

"Our LORD uses both Methods at once, in order to fit his Disciples for their Duty, to open their Eyes, to extend their Views, to extirpate Prejudices, to make every Man's Mind a rasa Tabula, or as his own Phrase is, to make plain the Ways of the LORD."

— Anonymous; [Lyttleton]

Date: 1748

"This was the true, the sole, the genuine Way of proceeding; for while carnal Desires, and such an over-weening Passion for Riches remained, their Breasts were barren Grounds, and thereby most unfit to receive the Seed of Divine Truths."

— Anonymous; [Lyttleton]

Date: 1748

The "Author of our Being, when he breathers into us the Breath of Life, and speaks us into Existence, leaves our Minds a pure Tabula rasa capable of any Impression, and free from all innate Prepossessions in favour of Vice or vicious Habits, but more susceptible from its own nature of virt...

— Anonymous

Date: 1748

"The Soul is created in a State of moral Rectitude, but receives its vicious Tinctures from the Body, and is warped into its perverse and crooked Disposition by the Influence of the Senses"

— Anonymous

Date: 1748

"Consequently, whenever a Man attempts to subdue his Passions, and to put them under the regular Government of their natural sovereign Reason, the irrational Part must submit to the rational, the Brute must yield to the Man, and the Soul in the Event gain the Superiority over every Passion or App...

— Anonymous

Date: June 27, 2025

"Quite often the thing that people respond to in my books is the train – the train wreck – of thought."

— Dyer, Geoff (b. 1958)