Date: 1733, 1748

Memory is a "Surprising storehouse! in whose narrow womb / All things, the past, the present, and to come, / Find ample space, and large and mighty room."

— Pilkington, Laetitia (c. 1709-1750)

Date: 1748, 1749

"These are the methods, as far as I comprehend, that have filled the brain with ideas, for the reception of which nature has formed it."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: November 10, 1750

"Is it possible that experience should produce error, and that the exemption of old people from the passions of youth, should be no better a privilege than to leave room for the love of money, which seems then to engross the whole soul, and to fill up the place of all the other passions!"

— Mulso [later Chapone], Hester (1727-1801)

Date: Tuesday, November 13, 1750

"Nothing seems to have been more universally dreaded by the ancients than orbity, or want of children; and, indeed, to a man who has survived all the companions of his youth, all who have participated his pleasures and his cares, have been engaged in the same events, and filled their minds with t...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, May 8, 1750

"I found in a country life a continual repetition of the same pleasures, which was not sufficient to fill up the mind for the present, or raise any expectations of the future; and I will confess to you, that I was impatient for a sight of the town, and filled my thoughts with the discoveries whic...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, August 7, 1750

"It ought, therefore, to be the care of those who wish to pass the last hours with comfort, to lay up such a treasure of pleasing ideas, as shall support the expenses of that time, which is to depend wholly upon the fund already acquired."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, August 28, 1750

"The miser always imagines that there is a certain sum that will fill his heart to the brim; and every ambitious man, like king Pyrrhus, has an acquisition in his thoughts that is to terminate his labours, after which he shall pass the rest of his life in ease or gaiety, in repose or devotion."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, April 3, 1750

"He must fly from himself, either because he feels a tediousness in life from the equipoise of an empty mind, which, having no tendency to one motion more than another, but as it is impelled by some external power, must always have recourse to foreign objects; or he must be afraid of the intrusio...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Tuesday, October 2, 1750

"[T]hough I do not pretend to give laws to the legislators of mankind, or to limit the range of those powerful minds that carry light and heat through all the regions of knowledge, yet I have long thought, that the greatest part of those who lose themselves in studies by which I have not found th...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Saturday, November 17, 1750

"He that without acquaintance with the power of desire, the cogency of distress, the complications of affairs, or the force of partial influence, has filled his mind with the excellence of virtue, and, having never tried his resolution in any encounters with hope or fear, believes it able to stan...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)