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Date: September 10, 1836

"What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest, — and all to form the Hand of the mind;...

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

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Date: September 10, 1836

"When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added, grace and expression."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

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Date: 1845

"Their minds had been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental darkness."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

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Date: 1854

"The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

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Date: 1922

"I plucked my soul out of its secret place, / And held it to the mirror of my eye, / To see it like a star against the sky, / A twitching body quivering in space, / A spark of passion shining on my face."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

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Date: August, 1965

"His mind's all black thickets / and blood."

— Harrison, Jim (1937-2016)

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Date: 1984

"In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

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Date: 1990

"now you see the / two doctors, behind / you, in mind's eye, / probe into your anus, / or ass, or bottom, / behind you, the roto- / rooter-like device / sees all up, concludes / 'like a worn-out inner tube'"

— Creeley, Robert (1926-2005)

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Date: 1990

"I did not know the soul / is cleaved so that the soul might be restored. / Live wood hewn, / its sap springs from a sticky wound."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

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Date: 1991

"Zulu Nation, brothers that's creation; / Minds get flooded, ejaculation -- / Right on the two inch tape."

— Tribe Called Quest [Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Jarobi White]

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