Date: 1768

"When the situation is, what we would wish, nothing is so ill-timed as to hint at the circumstances which make it so: you thank Fortune, continued she--you had reason--the heart knew it, and was satisfied; and who but an English philosopher would have sent notices of it to the brain to reverse th...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1768

"In saying this, I was making not so much La Fleur's eloge, as my own, having been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so, till I die, being firmly persuaded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1774

"While awake, and in health, this busy principle [the imagination] cannot much delude us: it may build castles in the air, and raise a thousand phantoms before us; but we have every one of the senses alive, to bear testimony to its falsehood."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"Reason, therefore, at once gives judgment upon the cause; and the vagrant intruder, imagination, is imprisoned, or banished from the mind."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"Reason's Sovereign-Rule" may be denied (by Faith)

— Nugent, Robert [or Craggs] (1702-1788)

Date: 1775

"Coriolanus has here carried his sternness, and the strained principles of stoical pride, whose throne is only in the mind, as far as they could go; and now great Nature, whose more sovereign seat of empire is in the heart, takes her turn to triumph; for upon the joint prayers, tears, and intreat...

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1776

"I have very uneasy apprehensions, tho' I hope they are not well founded, that Sir James Desmond's ruling passion is the love of play."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1776

"Banished be the vile idea from every honest breast, and may his couch be ever strewed with thorns, that can for his sport, create a pang, in the bosom of unsuspecting innocence!"

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1776

"Too much a slave to all the fond affections of the heart, love for my brother tempted me to hope that his society might sooth my griefs, and lull my cares to rest."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1776

"he more approaching to the testimony of our senses every philosophical solution is, the more perhaps is it conformable to nature."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)