Date: 1744

"Holiness elevates the worth of the being in which it is, and is of more value than the being itself. As in scarlet, the bare dye is of greater value than the cloath."

— South, Robert (1634-1716)

Date: Tuesday, July 3, 1750

"There is yet another danger in this practice: men who cannot deceive others, are very often successful in deceiving themselves; they weave their sophistry till their own reason is entangled, and repeat their positions till they are credited by themselves."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1774

"A learned parson, rusting in his cell, at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well upon the nature of man; will profoundly analyze the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the senses, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what; and yet, unfortunately, h...

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1790, 1794

"How many fine-spun threads of reasoning would my wandering thoughts have broken; and how difficult should I have found it to arrange arguments and inferences in the cells of my brain!"

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: December 1790

"But it was the poor man with only his native dignity who was thus oppressed – and only metaphysical sophists and cold mathematicians can discern this insubstantial form; it is a work of abstraction – and a gentleman of lively imagination must borrow some drapery from fancy before he can love or ...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 10, 1790; 1791

"When the Student has been habituated to this grand conception of the Art, when the relish for this stile is established, makes a part of himself, and is woven into his mind, he will, by this time, have got a power of selecting from whatever occurs in nature that is grand, and corresponds with th...

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: 1794

"When we are suddenly awaked by any violent stimulus, the surprise totally disunites the trains of our sleeping ideas from these of our waking ones; but if we gradually awake, this does not happen; and we readily unravel the preceding trains of imagination."

— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)