Date: 1766-1769, 1956

"Only this more. The ideas--my lodgers--are of all sorts. Some, gentlemen of the law, who pay me a great deal more than others. Divines of all sorts have been with me, and have ever disturbed me. When I first took up house, Presbyterian ministers used to make me melancholy with dreary tones. Meth...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1774

"In this manner, as a master-builder has his materials prepared by inferiour workmen, or as a history painter is provided with his colours by the labour of others, so the faculty of invention often receives the entire ideas which it exhibits, from the inferiour faculties, and employs itself only...

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1774

"I often paint you in my imagination, in your present lontananza, and, while I view you in the light of ancient and modern learning, useful and ornamental knowledge, I am charmed with the prospect; but when I view you in another light, and represent you awkward, ungraceful, ill-bred, with vulgar ...

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1776-1789

"The dissolute tyranny of Commodus, the civil wars occasioned by his death, and the new maxims of policy introduced by the house of Severus, had all contributed to increase the dangerous power of the army, and to obliterate the faint image of laws and liberty that was still impressed on the minds...

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1776

"It is his purpose in this Work, on the one hand, to exhibit, he does not say, a correct map, but a tolerable sketch of the human mind; and aided by the lights which the poet and the orator so amply furnish, to disclose its secret movements, tracing its principal channels of perception and action...

— Campbell, George (1719-1796)

Date: 1776

"It is sufficient that such things be hinted to the understanding, so that the meaning may be apprehended, it is by no means fit that they be painted in the liveliest colours to the fancy."

— Campbell, George (1719-1796)

Date: 1781

"Which, like a skilful artist, goes to work upon the materials furnished by the senses; comparing selecting, analysing, and abstracting; till by placing them in different points of view their fitness, relations, and dependencies are seen."

— Rotheram, John (1725–1789)

Date: 1781

"But the difference is much greater between the ideas of sense, the materials upon which the mind first begins its work, and the truths produced by its operations, than between the rough marble, and the statue formed by the skill of PHIDIAS."

— Rotheram, John (1725–1789)

Date: 1781

"Let matter then be allowed to furnish the first materials; the enlightened mind, which by its operations upon these discovers truth, and pursues it through all its distant connections, must have powers as far superiour to that which gave the first impression, as PHIDIAS is superiour to the marble."

— Rotheram, John (1725–1789)

Date: 1782

"A letter is the soul's portrait. It is not a cold image, with its stagnation, so remote from love; it lends itself to all our emotions; turn by turn it grows animated, it enjoys, it rests"

— Laclos, Pierre (-Ambrose-François) Choderlos de (1741-1803)