Date: 1743

"When Sorrow wounds the breast, as ploughs the glebe, / And hearts obdurate feel her softening shower; / Her seed celestial, then, glad Wisdom sows; / Her golden harvest triumphs in the soil."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1743

"I'll range the plenteous intellectual field; / And gather every thought of sovereign power, / To chase the moral maladies of man; / Thoughts which may bear transplanting to the skies, / Though natives of this coarse penurious soil; / Nor wholly wither there, where seraphs sing, / Refined, exalte...

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Hitherto the stores, / Which feed thy mind and exercise her powers, / Partake the relish of their native soil, / Their parent earth."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1748

"But more he search'd the mind, and roused from sleep / Those moral seeds whence we heroic actions reap."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: Tuesday, February 12, 1751

"There are many diseases both of the body and mind, which it is far easier to prevent than to cure, and therefore I hope you will think me employed in an office not useless either to learning or virtue, if I describe the symptoms of an intellectual malady, which, though at first it seizes only th...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1766

"Every tender epithet bestowed on her sister brought a pang to her heart and a tear to her eye; and as one vice, tho' cured, ever plants others where it has been, so her former guilt, tho' driven out by repentance, left jealousy and envy behind."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1771

"That is, let not great examples, or authorities, browbeat they reason into too great a diffidence fo thyself: thyself so reverence, as to prefer the native growth of thy own mind to the richest import from abroad; such borrowed riches make us poor."

— Author Unknown

Date: 1773

Toil and danger "feed and ripen minds" (not "meats and drinks" or "balmy airs, and vernal suns and showers")

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1778

"A thirst for knowledge, which can never be gratified, would not have been implanted; a mind which was to be chained to the earth, would never have been bent on the skies"

— Caulfield (fl. 1778)

Date: 1779, 1781

"A memory admitting some things and rejecting others, an intellectual digestion that concocted the pulp of learning, but refused the husks, had the appearance of an instinctive elegance, of a particular provision made by Nature for literary politeness."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)