Date: 1748, 1749

"In proportion as the motion of the blood grows calm, a soft soothing sense of peace and tranquility spreads itself over the whole machine; the soul finds itself sweetly weighed down with slumber, and sinks with the fibres of the brain: it becomes thus paralytic as it were, by degrees, together w...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"Every individual soul, in short, like every individual machine or organism, has its own best conditions of efficiency. A given machine will run best under a certain steam-pressure, a certain amperage; an organism under a certain diet, weight, or exercise."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: May 7, 2012

"The fear gets released later on, while I'm falling asleep and near-misses replay themselves in my mind's eye like an endless computer game fraught with constant hazards, in which I'm a disembodied Steadicam hurtling through busy city streets at the same speed something falls, pedestrians appeari...

— Kreider, Tim (b. 1967)

Date: November 14, 2015

"The venerated political strategist David Axelrod once described a presidential campaign as 'an M.R.I. for the soul.'"

— Bruni, Frank (b. 1964)

Date: December 9, 2015

"But it comes with a troubling idea of what literature is today: a salve for the distracted mind; a groove along which thoughts disordered by the bad habits of centripetal reading might fall back into line."

— Lupton, Christina