Date: 1937

"Yes, the gadget mind is useful in its place; it can do many things. But the spiritual mind, God-illumined, is the hope of the race."

— Newton, Joseph Fort (1876-1950)

Date: 1941, 1942

"I think that his [the poet's] function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: 1946

"his brain appears, throned in "fantastic triumph," / and shines through his hat / with jeweled works at work at intermeshing crowns, / lamé with lights."

— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

Date: 1958

"I believe it was your colleague Hospers who proposed this useful figure: that whereas both thoughts and words have meaning, just as both the sun and moon send light to us, the meaning of the words is related to the meaning of the thoughts just as the light of the moon is related to that of the s...

— Chisholm, Roderick (1916-1999)

Date: 1955, 1958

"It will be dark out there / with the Salvation Army Band. / And the mind its own illumination."

— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)

Date: 1984

"Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1990

"The noise the body makes / when the body meets / the soul over the soul's ocean and penumbra / is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out, / a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood / into the ear; a lover's / heart-shaped tongue; / flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes; / the butcher working / at ...

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 1994

"Because you are traveling right along with him as he forms his sentences, making each word he says appear as a little clump of letters on your screen, you begin to feel as if you are doing the thinking yourself; you occupy some dark space in the interior of his mind as he goes about his job."

— Baker, Nicholson (b. 1957)

Date: 1997

"She occupies now an entirely new angular relation to Mercy, to those refusals, among the Living, to act on behalf of Death or its ev'ryday Coercions,--Wages too low to live upon, Laws written by Owners, Infantry, Bailiffs, Prison, Death's thousand Metaphors in the World,--as if, the instant of h...

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 1997

"Mason had more than once caught the old Astronomer watching Susannah with a focus'd Patience he recogniz'd from the Sector Room...as if waiting for a sudden shift in the sky of Passion, like that headlong change in Star Position that had led him to the discovery of the Aberration of Light,-- wai...

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)