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Date: c. 370-365 B.C.

"And when this feeling continues and he is nearer to him and embraces him, in gymnastic exercises and at other times of meeting, then the fountain of that stream, which Zeus when he was in love with Ganymede named Desire, overflows upon the lover, and some enters into his soul, and some when he i...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

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Date: w. c. 238

"But if a slight wind passes over its surface, the submerged mud will be stirred up from the bottom, and the clarity and purity of the water at the top will be disturbed so that it is impossible to obtain the correct impression of even the general outline of the face. Now, the heart-mind is just ...

— Xunzi (died after 238 BC)

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Date: w. 1365, trans. 1579

"For what tempests and madnesse is there in these foure passions, to wit, to hope or desire, and to reioice, to feare and to bee sorie, whiche trouble the poore and miserable minde, by driuing him with sodeine windes and gales, in course far from the hauen into the middes of the dangerous rocks?"

— Petrarch (1304-1374); Twyne, Thomas (1543–1613)

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Date: c. 1603

"Just when the human mind, borne thither by some favouring gale, had found rest in a little truth, this man presumed to cast the closest fetters on our understandings."

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

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Date: 1615

"Go too then, is not he said to know himself, who can tell how to temper and order the state and condition of his mind, how to appease those civil tumults within himself, by the storms and waves whereof he is pitifully tossed, and how to suppress and appease those varieties of passions wherewith ...

— Crooke, Helkiah (1576-1648)

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Date: 1620

"Lastly, knowing how much the sight of man's mind is distracted by experience and history, and how hard it is at the first (especially for minds either tender or preoccupied) to become familiar with nature, I not unfrequently subjoin observations of my own, being as the first offers, inclinations...

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

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Date: 1641

The self may be imagined as a "pure, transparent, rarefied substance like a wind."

— Gassendi, Pierre (1592-1655)

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Date: 1641

The common view is that the mind is like "a wind or similar body"

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

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Date: 1649

"I see it a bad exchange to wound a mans owne Conscience, thereby to salve State sores; to calme the stormes of popular discontents, by stirring up a tempest in a mans owne bosome."

— Charles I (1600-1649); Gauden, John (1605-1662)

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Date: 1659

"When the minde is in a calme, our advice may saile over it with ease; but in a raging tempest the best admonitions run upon a desperate rock"

— Tubbe, Henry (1618-1655)

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