Date: 1817
"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: February, 1821
"This is the only true ideal--the heavenly tints of Fancy reflected in the bubbles that float upon the spring-tide of human life."
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)
Date: August 31, 1837
"The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon."
preview | full record— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
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."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1854
"What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many tho...
preview | full record— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Date: October 10, 1869
"Recitations alone readily degenerate into dusty repetitions, and lectures alone are too often a useless expenditure of force. The lecturer pumps laboriously into sieves. The water may be wholesome, but it runs through."
preview | full record— Eliot, Charles William (1834-1926)
Date: January, 1884
"As a snowflake-crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency and pa...
preview | full record— James, William (1842-1910)
Date: January, 1884
"If this "solidarity" of the stream of feelings is all that is meant by the Ego, -- if the Ego is merely a name for that fact, -- well and good, -- we seem agreed!"
preview | full record— James, William (1842-1910)
Date: 1892, 1899
"The flowing life of the mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with long Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct existence."
preview | full record— James, William (1842-1910)