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Date: 1790, 1794, 1795, 1818, 1827

"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

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Date: December 1790

"Not having leisure or patience to follow this desultory writer through all the devious tracks in which his fancy has started fresh game, I have confined my strictures, in a great measure, to the grand principles at which he has levelled many ingenious arguments in a very specious garb."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

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Date: December 1790

"The man has been changed into an artificial monster by the station in which he was born, and the consequent homage that benumbed his faculties like the torpedo’s touch."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

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Date: December 1790

"The passions are necessary auxiliaries of reason: a present impulse pushes us forward, and when we discover that the game did not deserve the chace, we find that we have gone over much ground, and not only gained many new ideas, but a habit of thinking."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

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Date: December 1790

"[A]n immoderate desire to please contracts the faculties, and immerges, to borrow the idea of a great philosopher, the soul in matter, till it becomes unable to mount on the wing of contemplation."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

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Date: 1792

"Yet disappointed as we are, in our researches, the mind gains strength by the exercise, sufficient, perhaps, to comprehend the answers which, in another step of existence, it may receive to the anxious questions it asked, when the understanding with feeble wing was fluttering round the visible e...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

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Date: 1792

"If I, he may thus argue, who exercise my own mind, and have been refined by tribulation, find the serpent's egg in some fold of my heart, and crush it with difficulty, shall I not pity those who have stamped with less vigour, or who have heedlessly nurtured the insidious reptile till it poisoned...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

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Date: 1793

"The offspring of mind is daily sacrificed by hecatombs to the genius of monarchy."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1793

The author can't understand an afterlife "where the mind, doomed to everlasting inactivity, shall be wholly a prey to the upbraidings of remorse and the sarcasms of devils, is so foreign to the system of things with which I am acquainted"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1793

"Purify your mind from the gross ideas of sense, and elevate it to the single contemplation of that abstract individual of which particular men are so many detached members, valuable only for the place they fill"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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