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Date: August 31, 1837

"But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, — watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; — must relinquish display and immediate fame."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

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Date: 1841

"It is the solar system of the mind."

— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)

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Date: 1854

"All closely imprisoned forces rend and destroy. The air that would be healthful to the earth, the water that would enrich it, the heat that would ripen it, tear it when caged up. So in her bosom even now; the strongest qualities she possessed, long turned upon themselves, became a heap of obdura...

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

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Date: 1854

"And it is but a twin fact with this, that in France alone woman has had a vital influence on the development of literature; in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred; in France alone, ...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

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Date: 1854

"The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of ideas; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneous activity; the voltaic-pile is not strong enough to produce crystallizations; phantasms of great ideas float through her mind, but she has not ...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

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Date: 1883

"Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars / With memory of the old revolt from Awe, / He reached a middle height, and at the stars, / Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank"

— Meredith, George (1828-1909)

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Date: January, 1884

"The demand for atoms of feeling, which shall be real units, seems a sheer vagary, an illegitimate metaphor."

— James, William (1842-1910)

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Date: January, 1884

"The best symbol for [the brain] seems to be an electric conductor, the amount of whose charge at any one point is a function of the total charge elsewhere."

— James, William (1842-1910)

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