Date: 1768

"I vow, I never had my affections more tenderly awakened; or do I remember an incident in my life, where the dissipated spirits, to which my reason had been a bubble, were so suddenly call'd home."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1768

"When my way is too rough for my feet, or too steep for my strength, I get off it, to some smooth velvet path which fancy has scattered over with rose-buds of delights; and having taken a few turns in it, come back strengthen'd and refresh'd."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1768

"Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your passions, tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them?"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1769

"The first reverend sage who delivered himself on this mysterious subject, having stroked his grey beard, and hemmed thrice with great solemnity, declared that the soul was an animal; a second pronounced it to be the number three, or proportion; a third contended for the number seven, or harmony;...

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1769

"Pox on their philosophy! Instead of demonstrating the immortality of the soul, they have plainly proved the soul is a chimæra, a will o' the wisp, a bubble, a term, a word, a nothing!"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1770-1

"This rather disconcerted his scheme, and set him a scratching, that being a kind of involuntary motion with him, whenever a train of ideas kept whirling in his brain with such velocity that he could not fix on any single one to stick by, and let the rest whirl out the way they came in."

— Bridges, Thomas (b. 1710?, d. in or after 1775)

Date: 1771

"[T]he fumes of faction not only disturb the faculty of reason, but also pervert the organs of sense"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1771

"My heart seemed to die within me when I entered this dismal bagnio, and sound my brain assaulted by such insufferable effluvia."

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1771

"O gracious! my poor Welsh brain has been spinning like a top ever since I came hither!"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1771

"A small stock of ideas is more easily managed, and sooner displayed than a great quantity crowded together"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)