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."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: February, 1821

"I said to myself, 'This is true eloquence: this is a man pouring out his mind on paper.'"

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: March, 1826

"And both these effects are of equal use to human life; for the mind of man is like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager, in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated by gentle gales; and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions or affe...

— Lamb, Charles (1775-1834)

Date: January, 1833

"[Philosophy] cuts fresh channels for thought, but does not fill up such as it finds ready-made: it traces, on the contrary, more deeply, broadly, and distinctly, those into which the current has spontaneously flowed."

— Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873)

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: August-November, 1871

"[B]ut the mind of Mr. Rossetti is like a glassy mere, broken only by the dive of some water-bird or the hum of winged insects, and brooded over by an atmosphere of insufferable closeness, with a light blue sky above it, sultry depths mirrored within it, and a surface so thickly sown with water-l...

— Buchanan, Robert (1841–1901)

Date: November 22, 1990

"I do not feel alive, except insofar as a stream of feeling -- perceiving, imagining, remembering, reflecting, revising, recategorizing runs through me."

— Sacks, Oliver (b. 1933)