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Date: 1741

"There are are some Persons who complain they cannot remember divine or human Discourses which they hear, when in Truth their Thoughts are wandering half the Time, or they hear with such coldness and Indifferency and a trifling Temper of Spirit, that it is no wonder the Things which are read or s...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

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Date: 1744

"Yet still, through their disgrace [the passions'], no feeble ray / Of greatness shines, and tells us whence they fell: / But these (like that fallen monarch [Adam] when reclaim'd) / When Reason moderates the rein aright, / Shall re-ascend, remount their former sphere, / Where once they soar'd il...

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Passion's fierce illapse / Rouzes the mind's whole fabric; with supplies / Of daily impulse keeps the elastic powers / Intensely poiz'd, and polishes anew / By that collision all the fine machine: / Else rust would rise, and foulness, by degrees / Incumbering, choak at last what heaven design'd ...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

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Date: 1745

"A soul in commerce with her God is heaven; / Feels not the tumults and the shocks of life; / The whirls of passions, and the strokes of heart."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: 1752

"The Fear of which so affected the Serjeant, (for besides the Honour which he himself had for the Lady, he knew how tenderly his Friend loved her) that he was unable to speak; and had not his Nerves been so strongly braced that nothing could shake them, he had enough in his Mind to have set him a...

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

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Date: 1753

"We often see that to reverse this boasted constancy is the work of but a single minute,--and then in vain their past professions recoil upon their minds;--in vain the idea of the forsaken fair haunts them in nightly visions."

— Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza (1693?-1756)

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Date: 1754

"The mind would be little more than a channel through which ideas and notions glided from entity into nonentity."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

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Date: 1757, 1758, 1771, 1777

"Before my wondering sense new phantoms dance, / And stamp their horrid shapes upon my brain."

— Dodsley, Robert (1703-1764)

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Date: 1758, 1781

"Alas! All Souls are subject to like Fate, / All sympathizing with the Body's State; / Let the fierce Fever burn thro' ev'ry Vein, / And drive the madding Fury to the Brain, / Nought can the Fervour of his Frenzy cool, / But Aristotle's self's a Parish Fool!"

— Hawkins, William (1721-1801)

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Date: January 27, 1759.

"That it is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided, and to hide that from ourselves which must some time be found, is a truth which we all know, but which all neglect, and perhaps none more than the speculative reasoner, whose thoughts are always from home, whose eye wanders over life, whose ...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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