Date: 1754

But when we enter into a serious and impartial detail concerning this knowledge, and analyse carefully what the great pretenders to it have given and give us daily for knowledge, we shall be obliged to confess, that the human intellect is rather a rank than a fertile soil, barren without due cult...

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

Date: 1757

"Their root strikes deeper into the mind, and springs from the essential and universal properties of human nature."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1759

"To enforce the observation of justice, therefore, nature has implanted in the human breast that consciousness of ill-desert, those terrors of merited punishment which attend upon its violation, as the great safe-guards of the association of mankind, to protect the weak, to curb the violent, and ...

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1759

"Nature, however, when she implanted the seeds of this irregularity in the human breast, seems, as upon all other occasions, to have intended the happiness and perfection of the species."

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1759

"The mind of a man of Genius is a fertile and pleasant field, pleasant as Elysium, and fertile as Tempe"

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"That is, let not great Examples, or Authorities, browbeat thy Reason into too great a diffidence of thyself: Thyself so reverence as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad; such borrowed riches make us poor."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"The duty of children to their parents, a duty which nature implants in every breast, forms the strength of that government which has subsisted for time immemorial."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"A mind rightly instituted in the school of philosophy, acquires at once the stability of the oak, and the flexibility of the osier."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: January 1762

"Richardson sème dans les cœurs des germes de vertu qui y restent d’abord oisifs et tranquilles: ils y sont secrètement, jusqu’à ce qu’il se présente une occasion qui les remue et les fasse éclore. [Richardson sows in our hearts the seeds of virtue which at first remain still and inactive: their ...

— Diderot, Denis (1713-1784)

Date: 1764

"And by the way, according to the all-wise appointment of Providence, it is the same with the human mind, as it is with the earth; for education and good agriculture make the like improvements upon either."

— Harte, Walter (1708/9-1774)