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Date: 1762

"An idle mind, like fallow ground, is the soil for every weed to grow in; in it vice strengthens, the seed of every vanity flourishes unmolested and luxuriant; discontent, malignity, ill humour, spread far and wide, and the mind becomes a chaos, which it is beyond human power to call into order a...

— Scott [née Robinson], Sarah (1720-1795)

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Date: 1762

"Reflect, before the fatal Ax / My threatned Doom has wrought: / Nor sacrifice to sensual Taste / The nobler Growth of Thought."

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

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Date: 1773

Souls may be ripened in "our northern sky"

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

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Date: 1773

"Human nature is ever liable to corruption, and has in it the seeds of every vice, as well as of every virtue; and the first will be continually shooting forth and growing up, if not carefully watched and rooted out as fast as they appear."

— Mulso [later Chapone], Hester (1727-1801)

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Date: 1773

Toil and danger "feed and ripen minds" (not "meats and drinks" or "balmy airs, and vernal suns and showers")

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

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Date: 1777

Women "may cultivate the rose of imagination, and the valuable fruits of morals and criticism; but the steeps of Parnassus few comparatively, have attempted to scale with success."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

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Date: 1777

"Almost all the other passions may be made to take an amiable hue; but these two must either be totally extirpated, or be always contented to preserve their original deformity, and to wear their native black."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

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Date: 1777

"It [Genius] is an incommunicable faculty: no art or skill of the possessor can bestow the smallest portion of it on another: no pains or labour can reach the summit of perfection, where the seeds of it are wanting in the mind; yet it is capable of infinite improvement where it actually exists, a...

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

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Date: 1777

"The mind, says he, is a barren soil, is a soil soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized, and enriched with foreign matter."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

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Date: 1777

"He must invigorate them by exercise, polish them by conversation, and increase them by every species of elegant and virtuous knowledge, and the mind will not fail to reproduce with interest those seeds, which are sown in it by study and observation."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

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