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Date: 1789

"Far nobler prize my heart constrains, / Yielding to soft controul; / Far other beauty binds in chains / The magnet of my soul."

— Colvill, Robert (d. 1788)

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Date: 1791

"In progress of time, when my mind was, as it were, strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian aether, I could with much more facility and exactness, carry in my memory and commit to paper the exuberant variety of his wisdom and wit."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

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Date: 1794

"It [Christianity] has put the whole orbit of reason into shade."

— Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)

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Date: 1794

"There was a magnetical sympathy between me and my patron"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1795

"Lady Ruby is the loadstone that draws away every particle of steel that shou'd fortify my heart, and leaves it weaker than a woman's tear."

— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)

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Date: 1796

"Some hurt themselves by flippant WIT, / As too much GAS, balloons will split;-- / With buoyant splendour, up they rise, / The spirit bursts, the bubble dies."

— Courtenay, John Lees (1775?-1794)

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Date: 1796

"The effect [of wit on the mind] is strong,--because it's odd, / Like fire electric from a clod; / Or when fix'd air puts out a light, / Tho' vital makes it blaze more bright."

— Courtenay, John Lees (1775?-1794)

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Date: 1798

"Moral reasoning is nothing but the awakening of certain feelings; and the feeling by which he is actuated, is too strong to leave us much chance of impressing him with other feelings, that should have force enough to counterbalance it."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1799

"His emotion seemed to communicate itself, with an electrical rapidity, to my heart."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

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Date: 1800

Thoughts may be kept in "perpetual motion"

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

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