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Date: 1757

"Now the imagination is the most extensive province of pleasure and pain, as it is the region of our fears and our hopes, and of all our passions that are connected with them; and whatever is calculated to affect the imagination with these commanding ideas, by force of any original natural impres...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

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Date: 1757

"The mind of man has naturally a far greater alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in searching for differences; because by making resemblances we produce new images, we unite, we create, we enlarge our stock; but in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the imagi...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

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Date: 1757

"[T]he judgment is for the greater part employed in throwing stumbling blocks in the way of the imagination, in dissipating the scenes of enchantment, and in tying us down to the disagreeable yoke of our reason"

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

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Date: 1757

"The term Taste, like all other figurative terms, is not extremely accurate: the thing which we understand by it, is far from a simple and determinate idea in the minds of most men, and it is therefore liable to uncertainty and confusion."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

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Date: 1757

"They who have not taken these methods, if their Taste decides quickly, it is always uncertainly; and their quickness is owing to their presumption and rashness, and not to any sudden irradiation that in a moment dispels all darkness from their minds."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

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Date: 1760

"Whenever this shall be executed, it is to be looked upon as the work of true genius; but when fallen short of, as often happens, it is to be deemed the impotent effort of the hard-bound brains of low plagiaries, whose memory is filled with the shreds and ill-chosen scraps of other mens wit."

— Macklin, Charles (1697-1797)

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Date: 1760

"Squire Groome is no national characteristic of England, but a general representative of any person of the three kingdoms, who likes horse-racing, drinking, &c. preferably to any other happiness; but why he should be the type of the English nation, I cannot see, and therefore leave it to the very...

— Macklin, Charles (1697-1797)

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Date: 1760

"With how quick a succession, do days, months and years pass over our heads? -- how truly like a shadow that departeth do they flee away insensibly, and scarce leave an impression with us?"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

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Date: 1762

"Is the beauty of truth, or moral actions, or the deformity of falsehood, or vice, capable of being represented on paper, or on any other plain, except the rasa tabula of the mind?"

— Griffith, Richard (d. 1788)

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Date: April, 1762

"The metaphor is a shorter simile, or rather a kind of magical coat, by which the same idea assumes a thousand different appearances."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

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