Date: 1752, 1791

"This home philosophy, you know, / Was priz'd some thousand years ago. / Then why abroad a frequent guest? / Why such a stranger to your breast?"

— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)

Date: 1752, 1791

"Life's records rise on ev'ry side, / And Conscience spreads those volumes wide; / Which faithful registers were brought / By pale-ey'd Fear and busy Thought. / Those faults which artful men conceal, / Stand here engrav'd with pen of steel, / By Conscience, that impartial scribe!"

— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)

Date: 1850

"I neither seem / To lack that first great gift, the vital soul, / Nor general Truths, which are themselves a sort / Of Elements and Agents, Under-powers, / Subordinate helpers of the living mind"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Nor, sedulous as I have been to trace / How Nature by extrinsic passion first / Peopled the mind with forms sublime or fair, / And made me love them, may I here omit / How other pleasures have been mine, and joys / Of subtler origin."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"No familiar shapes / Remained, no pleasant images of trees, / Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; / But huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men, moved slowly through the mind / By day, and were a trouble to my dreams."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1902

"Looking back upon our own thought, we observe no Subject, like an admiral on the bridge of his flagship, dictating and controlling, some man above the man or in the man; we only note a process of development which requires no such assumption."

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

Date: 1902

"Shall we insist that the brain is to be isolated like a leper, that with it alone no permanent and predicable modifications follow from activity, though in both instances the effects are precisely similar and are produced in exactly the same manner?"

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

Date: 1949

"The mind is its own place and in his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe."

— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)

Date: 1992

"The mind--considered as intellect and will together--is, if all goes well, supreme in the human soul; but neither intellect nor will is an autocratic emperor; rather, they are joint consuls on the model of the Roman Republic."

— Kenny, Anthony (b. 1931)

Date: 1992

"Whenever she thought of what she was meant to say, it seemed to dash around the corner, and lose itself in the crowd of things she should not say. The most successful fugitives were often the dullest, the sentences that nobody notices until they are not spoken: 'How nice to see you...won't you s...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)