Date: 1754

"She put me upon recollecting the giddy scene, which those dreadfully interesting ones that followed it, had made me wish to blot out of my memory."

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1754

"I wish this ugly word foreign were blotted out of my vocabulary; out of my memory, rather"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1754

"Proceed, child, your mind is the unsullied book of nature: Turn to another Leaf"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1754

"Sir Charles Grandison's heart is the book of heaven-- May I not study it?"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1759

"The way to be happy is to live according to nature, in obedience to that universal and unalterable law with which every heart is originally impressed; which is not written on it by precept, but engraven by destiny, not instilled by education, but infused at our nativity."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1761

"[M]any, therefore, may violate that rule of right, which the hand of the Almighty has written upon the living tablets of the heart"

— Hawkesworth, John (bap. 1720, d. 1773)

Date: 1765 [1764]

"Manfred, who, though he had distinguished her by great indulgence, had imprinted her mind with terror from his causeless rigour to such amiable princesses as Hippolita and Matilda."

— Walpole, Horatio [Horace], fourth earl of Orford (1717-1797)

Date: 1765 [1764]

"There is not a sentiment engraven on my heart, that does not venerate you and yours."

— Walpole, Horatio [Horace], fourth earl of Orford (1717-1797)

Date: 1773

"I blot from my memory every other woman; those every-day beauties (as Terence calls them) who have nothing but their sex to recommend them."

— Graves, Richard (1715-1804)

Date: 1793

"Her mind was a kind of circulating library in little, and I sincerely wish romances were always attended with the same good effects they produced in her; for there is scarcely a good moral inculcated by them that she did not act up to."

— Dibdin, Charles (bap. 1745, d. 1814)