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Date: 360-355 B.C.

"When we are babies we must suppose this receptacle empty, and take the birds to stand for pieces of knowledge."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

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Date: 1759

"If you, these moral Truths, would comprehend, / To moral Writers, your Attention lend; / By reading them, you'll Wisdom's Honey gain, / And with her golden Stores, inrich your Brain."

— Marriott, Thomas (d. 1766)

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Date: 1780

"Those mental stores shall cheer the wintery hours, / And flowers unfading breathe their sweets at home.// Extracting food amid the vernal bloom, / So flies the industrious bee around the vale, / With native skill she forms the waxen comb, / To keep for wintery days the rich regale."

— Steele, Anne (1717-1778)

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Date: January 19, 1791

"But it is then, and basking in the sunshine of unmerited fortune, that low, sordid, ungenerous, and reptile souls swell with their hoarded poisons; it is then that they display their odious splendour, and shine out in full lustre of their native villainy and baseness."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

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Date: February 20, 2000

"I sometimes fancy that various archetypal situations circled tirelessly in Hitchcock's mind, like whales in a tank at the zoo."

— Ebert, Roger (1942-2013)

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Date: January 11, 2014

"'Think about a fish tank,' says Dr. Nedergaard. 'If you have a tank and no filter, the fish will eventually die. So, how do the brain cells get rid of their waste? Where is their filter?'"

— Konnikova, Maria (b. 1984)

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Date: March, 2014

"Memory, / a jar of flies. Spin off the lid."

— Seibles, Tim (b. 1955)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.