Date: 1755

"Ideas of the same race, though not exactly alike, are sometimes so little different, that no words can express the dissimilitude, though the mind easily perceives it, when they are exhibited together; and sometimes there is such a confusion of acceptations, that discernment is wearied, and disti...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1755

"The imperfect sense of some examples I lamented, but could not remedy, and hope they will be compensated by innumerable passages selected with propriety, and preserved with exactness; some shining with sparks of imagination, and some replete with treasures of wisdom."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1755

"Those who have much leisure to think, will always be enlarging the stock of ideas, and every increase of knowledge, whether real or fancied, will produce new words, or combinations of words."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1755

"When the mind is unchained from necessity, it will range after convenience; when it is left at large in the fields of speculation, it will shift opinions; as any custom is disused, the words that expressed it must perish with it; as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same ...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1755

"That it will immediately become popular I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders, and risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and harden ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last prevail, and...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Thursday, September 4, 1755

"No; let me consider this room [a library] as the great charnel-house of human reason, where darkness and corruption dwell."

— Anonymous

Date: Thursday, December 25, 1755

"The mind as well as the stomach must have food fitted and prepared to it's taste and humour, or it will reject and loath it."

— Anonymous

Date: 1755

"Those would seem Gentlemen! who strut the Mall, / In Waistcoats lac'd on Sundays--troll about, / Leaving their Minds undrest--all Show without."

— Arnold, Cornelius (b. 1714, d. in or after 1758)

Date: 1755

"To Modesty she made severe Pretence; / Under that Mask her Wantonness would hide; / Too thin Disguise! for oft the grosser Sense / Would reassume the Reins, drive over the weaker Fence."

— Arnold, Cornelius (b. 1714, d. in or after 1758)

Date: w. 1753-1758

"Si la loi naturelle n'était écrite que dans la raison humaine, elle serait peu capable de diriger la plupart de nos actions. Mais elles est encore gravée dans le coeur de l'homme en caractères ineffaçables; et c'est là qu'elle lui parle plus fortement que tous les préceptes des philosophes; c'es...

— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)