Date: w. c. 1748

"Secondly, Those Characters sink deeper into the Mind of the Reader, and stamp there a perfect Idea of the very Turn of Thought, by which the Originals were actuated, and diversified from each other."

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

Date: 1748, 1754

"[W]ere the Mind entirely under the Direction of Sense, and impressible only by such Objects as are present, and strike some of the outward Organs, we should then be precisely in the State of the Brute-Creation, and be governed solely by Instinct or Appetite, and have no Power to controul whateve...

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"In the fair sex, the soul adapts itself to the delicacy of constitution: thence flow that tenderness, that affection, those lively sentiments founded rather upon passion than reason; and in fine, those prejudices and superstitions whose impression is so hard to be effaced."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Hurried with incessant rapidity by the vortex of blood and animal spirits, one undulation makes an impression, which is immediately effaced by another; the soul pursues it, but often in vain: she must wait to bewail the loss of what she did not quickly lay hold of; and thus it is that the imagin...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"There is, say they, a law of nature, a knowledge of right and wrong deeply imprinted on the mind of man, which, in other animals, is not perceived."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Since there are evident commmunications betwixt the mother and the infant, and it is almost impossible to deny the facts produced by Tulpius and other authors of equal credit with him, we will therefore believe that it is by the same means that the foetus feels the force of the mother's imaginat...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: Tuesday, August 7, 1750

"[T]hey seem always to be fully employed, or to be completely at ease without employment, to feel few intellectual miseries or pleasures, and to have no exuberance of understanding to lay out upon curiosity or caprice, but to have their minds exactly adapted to their bodies, with few other ideas ...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, August 7, 1750

"But the images which memory presents are of a stubborn and untractable nature, the objects of remembrance have already existed, and left their signature behind them impressed upon the mind, so as to defy all attempts of rasure or of change."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, August 28, 1750

"Yet it too often happens that sorrow, thus lawfully entering, gains such a firm possession of the mind, that it is not afterwards to be ejected; the mournful ideas, first violently impressed and afterwards willingly received, so much engross the attention, as to predominate in every thought, to ...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, September 4, 1750

"But it must be strongly impressed upon our minds that virtue is not to be pursued as one of the means to fame, but fame to be accepted as the only recompense which mortals can bestow on virtue; to be accepted with complacence, but not sought with eagerness."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)