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Date: 1817

"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

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Date: 1831

"By the mind we understand that within us which feels and thinks, the seat of sensation and reason"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1831

In poetry we are "privileged occasionally to cast away the slough and exuviæ of the body from incumbering and dishonouring us, even as Ulysses passed over his threshold, stripped of the rags that had obscured him, while Minerva enlarged his frame, and gave loftiness to his stature, a...

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1831

Teaching in a crowded school is "like the undertaking, related by Livy, of Accius Navius, the augur, to cut a whetstone with a razor ... the sharpness of human faculties, is so blunted and destroyed"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1831

"The sublimest poet that ever sung, was peradventure, while a stripling, unconscious of the treasures which formed a part of the fabric of his mind, and unsuspicious of the high destiny that in the sequel awaited him."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1831

At a period in history the mind of man may be imagined "sunk into a profound sleep"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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Date: w. 1821, 1840

"There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind o...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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Date: w. 1821, 1840

"At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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