Date: w. 1821, 1840

"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sister...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: November 24, 1859

"A few naturalists, endowed with much flexibility of mind, and who have already begun to doubt on the immutability of species, may be influenced by this volume; but I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impa...

— Darwin, Charles (1809-1882)

Date: April, 1871

"There are cases where our intellect has gone through the arguments, and we give a clear assent to the conclusions. But our minds seem dry and unsatisfied."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: April, 1871

"There are, it is true, some minds which a mathematician might describe as minds of 'contrary flexure,' whose particular bent it is to contradict what those around them say."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: April, 1871

"And in violent cases of mania, where the mind is shut up within itself, and cannot, from impotence, perceive what is without, it is as sure of the most chance fancy, as in health it would be of the best proved truths."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: April, 1871

"They are all from various causes "adhesive" states--states which it is very difficult to get rid of, and which, in consequence, have retained their power of creating belief in the mind, when other states, which once possessed it too, have quite lost it."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: April, 1871

"Constantly impressed ideas are brought back by the world around us, and if they are so often, get so tied to our other ideas that we can hardly wrench them away."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: April, 1871

"Dry minds, which give an intellectual 'assent' to conclusions which feel no strong glow of faith in them, often do not know what their opinions are."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)