Date: 1768

"Every dirty passion, and bad propensity in my nature, took the alarm, as I stated the proposition."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: November, 1769?

"And give me back my heart again, / And oh! instruct the roving guest, / No more to wander from my breast."

— Shaw, Cuthbert (1738-1771)

Date: 1769

"He knew when to distract its weak brain with a tumult of incongruous and contradictory ideas: he knew when to overwhelm its feeble faculty of thinking, by pouring in a torrent of words without any ideas annexed. These throng in like city-milliners to a Mile-end assembly, while it happens to be u...

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1769

"I can assure thee, Peacock, that Richard was a prince of a very agreeable aspect, and excelled in every personal accomplishment; neither was his heart a stranger to the softer passions of tenderness and pity"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1769

"The first moment I saw Colonel Rivers convinced me my heart had till then been a stranger to true tenderness"

— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)

Date: 1770

"Spontaneous joys, where nature has its play, / The soul adopts and owns their firstborn sway; / Lightly they frolic o'er the vacant mind, / Unenvied, unmolested, unconfined."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1770

"How light my heart feels from / A villainous guest that sat like lead upon it!"

— Armstrong, John (1708/9-1779)

Date: 1770

"But this faculty [Reason] has been much perverted, often to vile, and often to insignificant purposes; sometimes chained like a slave or malefactor, and sometimes soaring in forbidden and unknown regions."

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1770

"What is it to which a wise man will pay more attention, than to his reason and conscience, those divine monitors by which he is to judge even of religion itself, and which he is not at liberty to disobey, though an angel from heaven should command him?"

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1770

"We are informed by Father MALEBRANCHE, that the senses were at first as honest faculties as one could desire to be endued with, till after they were debauched by original sin; an adventure, from which they contracted such an invincible propensity to cheating, that they are now continually lying ...

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)