Date: 1747-8

"Yet her charming body is not equally organized. The unequal partners pull two ways; and the divinity within her tears her silken frame."

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

Date: 1751

"This Speech, I own, gave me the first Reflection I ever had in my Life, and lock'd up all my Faculties for a long Time; nor was I able, for the Variety of Ideas that crowded my Brain, to make a Word of Answer, but stood like an Image of Stone"

— Paltock, Robert (1697-1767)

Date: 1753

The heart may a "stranger to those young desires which haunt the fancy and warm breast of youth"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1754

"Intellect, the artificer, works lamely without his proper instrument, sense; which is the case when he works on moral ideas."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Within my bosom reigns another lord; / Honour, sole judge and umpire of itself."

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: 1759

"These natural pangs of an afrighted conscience are the daemons, the avenging furies which in this life haunt the guilty, which allow them neither quiet nor repose, which often drive them to despair and distraction, from which no assurance of secrecy can protect them, from which no principles of ...

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: October 13, 1759

"My heart, a victim to thine eyes, / Should I at once deliver, / Say, would the angry fair one prize / The gift, who slights the giver?"

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1759

"Even this Piece of Wisdom did not find its Way into his Mind by Reflexion (that Passage for its Entrance had long been too closely barricadoed), but came in at his Eyes, and engaged his constant Counsellors, his Inclinations, on the Side of a fair Object he had accidentally beheld, at the House ...

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"I mention this, not only as matter of hypothesis or conjecture upon the progress and establishment of my father's many odd opinions,--but as a warning to the learned reader against the indiscreet reception of such guests, who, after a free and undisturbed enterance, for some years, into our brai...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"But for sleep--I know I shall make nothing of it before I begin--I am no dab at your fine sayings in the first place--and in the next, I cannot for my soul set a grave face upon a bad matter, and tell the world--'tis the refuge of the unfortunate--the enfranchisement of the prisoner--the downy l...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)