Date: 1754

"How often has that tender bosom, whose glory it would have been to melt at another's woe, and to rejoice in acts of kindness and benevolence to her fellow-creatures, been armed by herself ... not with defensive, but offensive, steel"

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

Date: 1755

"You've plainly shewn your soul was brazen, / And eke your snowy bosom flinty."

— Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (1547-1616); Smollett, Tobias (1721-1771)

Date: 1756, 1766

"And as to gold's being so yielding and ductile by human art, it is to be observed, that in return it exerts a greater power on the human mind. "

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1759

"Their grief, however, like their joy, was transient; every thing floated in their mind unconnected with the past or future, so that one desire easily gave way to another, as a second stone cast into the water effaces and confounds the circles of the first."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1760

"Heaven has blessed thee with a fertile genius, and steel'd thy soul with fortitude"

— Johnstone, Charles (c.1719-c.1800)

Date: 1760-7

"Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal; but Gold and Silver will pass all the world over without any other recommendation than their own weight."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"There was the great king Aldrovandus, and Bosphorus, and Capadocius, and Dardanus, and Pontus, and Asius,--to say nothing of the iron-hearted Charles the XIIth, whom the Countess of K***** herself could make nothing of"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1761

Faulkland has "steeled my husband's heart against me, heaped infamy on my head, and loaded my mother's age with sorrow and remorse"

— Sheridan [née Chamberlaine], Frances (1724-1766)

Date: 1761

"If the unfortunate Mr. Arnold sees his error, can you be so unchristian as to endeavour at steeling his wife's heart against him?"

— Sheridan [née Chamberlaine], Frances (1724-1766)

Date: 1761

"Did not your master Plato maintain, that all the art of man, that all philosophy could not extract from the human mind what nature had not implanted there; as all the operations in chemistry are incapable of extracting from any mixture more gold than is already contained in it?"

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778); Kenrick, William (1729/30-1779)