Date: 1754

"The mind that chuses to nourish the turba, by a restless desire after impossibilities, takes delight, like the fireship, to communicate its devouring flame to all that are so miserable as to fall in its way"

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1754

"It was the error of your judgment, Cylinda, and not a malicious heart, that caused your desire of leading my imagination in the same road with your own"

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1756, 1766

"As the instincts and passions were wisely and kindly given us, to subserve many purposes of our present state, let them have their proper, subaltern share of action; but let reason ever have the sovereignty, (the divine law of reason and truth) and be, as it were, sail and wind to the vessel of ...

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1756, 1766

"This is beyond the reach of our conception. Imagination cannot plumb her line so low."

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1759

"Dissembling Love his Temper may conceal, / But Wedlock will his hidden Soul unvail; / So distant Ships, at Sea, wear false Disguise, / But show true Colors, when they seize a Prize."

— Marriott, Thomas (d. 1766)

Date: 1760

"How short aspiring Reason's vaunted Line, / When stretch'd to search thy Ways, thy Works divine!""

— Langhorne, John (1735-1779)

Date: 1760-7

"Though man is of all others the most curious vehicle, said my father, yet at the same time 'tis of so slight a frame and so totteringly put together, that the sudden jerks and hard jostlings it unavoidably meets with in this rugged journey, would overset and tear it to pieces a dozen times a day...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"But here, you must distinguish--the thought floated only in Dr. Slop's mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as your worship knows, are every day swiming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of a man's understanding, without being carried backwards o...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1761

"My Soul is tost / Upon a sea of blood, whose stormy channel / My lab'ring bark must pass, e're it can reach / That land of Peace, to which its Hopes are bound."

— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"Thus, as a bark on every side beset with storms, enjoys a state of rest, so does the mind, when influenced by a just equipoise of the passions, enjoy tranquility"

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)