Date: 1748, 1754

"Little Objects, mean Company, mean Cares, and mean Business cramp the Mind, contract its Views, and give it a creeping Air and Deportment."

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1754

"But when [the mind] soars above mortal Cares and mortal Pursuits, into the Regions of Divinity, and converses with the greatest and best of Beings, it spreads itself into a wider Compass, takes higher Flights in Reason and Goodness, and becomes God-like in its Air and Manners."

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1754

"[I]t may be said of most Men, that their intellectual Organs are as much shut up and secluded from proper Nourishment and Exercise in that little Circle to which they are confined, as the bodily Organs are in the Womb."

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: w. 1740, 1748

"But when your early Care shall have design'd / To plan the Soul and mould the waxen Mind; / When you shall pour upon his tender Breast / Ideas that must stand an Age's Test, / Oh! there imprint with strongest deepest dye / The lovely form of Goddess LIBERTY!"

— Walpole, Horatio [Horace], fourth earl of Orford (1717-1797)

Date: 1749

One may give and take "with a gust inexpressible, a kiss of welcome, that my heart rising to my lips, stamp'd with its warmest impression"

— Cleland, John (bap. 1710, d. 1789)

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

"These are the animals, that resemble man the most; for we observe likewise amongst them the same gradual analogy, in relation to the callous body, in which Lancisi had placed the seat of the Soul, before the late Monsieur de la Peyronnie, who has illustrated this opinion with a variety of experi...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"All this knowledge therefore, the vanity of which puffs up the giddy brain of our supercilious pedants, is nothing but a vast heap of words and figures, which form in the head the traces by which we distinguish and remember objects."

— 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

"Such is the chaos, such the rapid and continual succession of our ideas; they drive one another successively, as one wave impels another; so that it the imagination does not employ a part of its muscles, poised as it were in an equilibrium upon the strings of the brain, so as to sustain itself s...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)