Date: 1691

"Can it be a Fault to chuse a better for a worse, and don't all the thinking World agree that this state we are now in, is but a Slavery to sence, a bondage to dull matter, which tedders us down like our Brother Brutes, where we are not only exposed to want and misery, but to all the Insults and ...

— Dunton, John (1659–1732)

Date: 1691

"And shou'd an Evangelist, with an Angel at his Elbow, have told me that Goddess of my Soul had so much as one speck of Deformity, one single Mole, either in Body or Mind, I shou'd have said--By your leave, Mr. Evangelist,--I must suspend my Faith."

— Dunton, John (1659–1732)

Date: 1700

"What does the World think of this holding up the Buckler, they put but a bad Construction upon it, and say that his Conscience is Ulcerated, that you cannot touch any String, but it will answer to some painful place."

— Brown, Thomas (bap. 1663, d. 1704)

Date: May 10, 1704

"And indeed it seems not unreasonable that books, the children of the brain, should have the honour to be christened with variety of names, as well as other infants of quality."

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: May 10, 1704

"Nor is mankind so much to blame in his choice thus determining him, if we consider that the debate merely lies between things past and things conceived, and so the question is only this: whether things that have place in the imagination may not as properly be said to exist as those that are seat...

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1722

"I had now such a Load on my Mind that it kept me perpetually waking."

— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)

Date: 1724

"This was a dreadful Blow to me; tho' I cannot say I was so surpriz'd as I should otherwise have been; for all the while he was gone, my Mind was oppress'd with the Weight of my own Thoughts; and I was as sure that I should never see him any more, that I think nothing could be like it; the Impres...

— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)

Date: 1741

"'Passion,' continued the doctor, still holding the dish, 'throws the mind into too violent a fermentation; it is a kind of fever of the soul or, as Horace expresses it, a short madness'

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744); Arbuthnot, John (bap. 1677, d. 1735)

Date: 1760-7

Wit and judgment "in this world never go together; inasmuch as they are two operations differing from each other as wide as east is from west.--So, says Locke,--so are farting and hickuping, say I."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"But for sleep--I know I shall make nothing of it before I begin--I am no dab at your fine sayings in the first place--and in the next, I cannot for my soul set a grave face upon a bad matter, and tell the world--'tis the refuge of the unfortunate--the enfranchisement of the prisoner--the downy l...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)