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Date: August 6 and 20, 1859

"The jaded cart-horse of the commonplace bourgeois mind falters of course in confusion in front of the ditch separating substance from appearance, and cause from effect; but one should not ride carthorses if one intends to go coursing over the very rough ground of abstract reasoning."

— Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895)

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Date: 1902

"Looking back upon our own thought, we observe no Subject, like an admiral on the bridge of his flagship, dictating and controlling, some man above the man or in the man; we only note a process of development which requires no such assumption."

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

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Date: 1923

"His heart knocked like a Ford car trying to climb the roof of a Methodist church."

— Wilstach, Frank J.

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Date: 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951

"It is certainly not then--not in dreams--but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower."

— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)

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Date: 1964

"Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. ...

— Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979)

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Date: 1995, 2002

"However, as I said last night, we just ask for this because most of us consider ourselves as chauffeurs inside our bodies, which we own in the same way as we own a car. When it goes wrong we take it to the mechanic to fix it and we do not really identify with our body, just as we do not really i...

— Watts, Alan (1915-1973)

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Date: 2006

"The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) in which the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver's father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing ...

— Haidt, Jonathan

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Date: 2006

"When people looked for metaphors, they saw the mind as the driver of a car, or as a program running on a computer."

— Haidt, Jonathan

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Date: 2007

"I have a brain full of remembered names but the road is often blocked with rubble."

— Engel, Howard (b. 1931)

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Date: August 3, 2009

"After a while, your thoughts will drift off to the unused siding where the old tall weeds are, and the string of curving words will toot a mournful toot and pull ahead."

— Baker, Nicholson (b. 1957)

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