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Date: Tuesday, March 12, 1751

"There is no snare more dangerous to busy and excursive minds, than the cobwebs of petty inquisitiveness, which entangle them in trivial employments and minute studies, and detain them in a middle state, between the tediousness of total inactivity, and the fatigue of laborious efforts, enchant th...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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Date: June, 1756

"I sent back memory, in heedful guise, / To search the records of preceding years; / Home, like the raven to the ark, she flies, / Croaking bad tidings to my trembling ears."

— Smart, Christopher (1722-1771)

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Date: 1759

"To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the wing, is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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Date: 1760, 1761

"Reason, collected in herself, disdains / The slavish yoke of arbitrary chains"

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

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Date: 1760-7

"That had said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observ'd all her motions,--her machinations;--tra...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

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Date: 1760-7

"When a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion,--or, in other words, when his Hobby-Horse grows head-strong,--farewell cool reason and fair discretion!"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

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Date: 1760-7

"But here the mind has all the evidence and facts within herself;--is conscious of the web she has wove;--knows its texture and fineness, and the exact share which every passion has had in working upon the several designs which virtue or vice has plann'd before her."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

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Date: 1760-7

"Shall not conscience rise up and sting him on such occasions?"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

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Date: 1760-7

"The very idea of so noble, so refined, so immaterial, and so exalted a being as the Anima, or even the Animus, taking up her residence, and sitting dabbling, like a tad-pole, all day long, both summer and winter, in a puddle,--or in a liquid of any kind, how thick or thin soever, he would say, s...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

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Date: 1760-7

"Now don't let Satan, my dear girl, in this chapter, take advantage of any one spot of rising-ground to get astride of your imagination, if you can any ways help it; or if he is so nimble as to slip on,--let me beg of you, like an unback'd filly, to frisk it, to squirt it, to jump it, to rear it,...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

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