Date: 1799

"If I knew but of a key to his heart, my closet should be open to him directly

— Geisweiler, Maria (fl. 1799); Kotezebue (1761-1819)

Date: w. c. 1864, published 1929

"Experience is the Angled Road / Preferred against the Mind / By -- Paradox -- the Mind itself -- / Presuming it to lead."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1971, 1978

"Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead."

— Arendt, Hannah (1906-1975)

Date: 1999

"As the brain gets more complex in the womb, then, like a dimmer switch, consciousness gradually grows and burgeons until, of course, in adulthood it reaches its particular pinnacles or depths."

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)

Date: 1999

"On its own this trigger, as we can see from the earlier definition, is not going to generate consciousness. Imagine a candyfloss machine with a stick in the centre that then gathers more and more candyfloss as time goes on. Think of the epicentre as the stick in the centre, the burgeoning candy...

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)

Date: 1999

"Another rather simplistic analogy might be a boss, at the centre of a big organization that is eventually going to recruit managers and submanagers. What in the brain could be the equivalent of the boss? The most obvious candidate, and one that might immediately spring to mind, is the basic comp...

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)

Date: 1999

"Perhaps the consciousness of dreaming is the almost random formation of little groups forming in different configurations like pebbles thrown very gently into the water. One can imagine the gentle ripples easily being displaced by the next pebble as it hits the water."

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)

Date: December 10, 2017

"Writing to Wilhelm Fleiss in 1896, Freud used the word Nachträglichkeit --'retranscription'--to describe the brain's action of calling up a memory and revising it in response to fresh circumstances."

— Krauss, Nicole (b. August 18, 1974)

Date: December 10, 2017

"As this can happen many times in a life, a memory might be described as having a kind of geological history, with different stratifications going back through time, 'representing the psychic achievement of successive epochs of life.'"

— Krauss, Nicole (b. August 18, 1974)

Date: December 10, 2017

"To fill oneself with the consciousness of others, and then to forget deeply enough, and long enough, that the collective world can be welded to what is unique and original to oneself--this is as precise and moving a definition of creativity as I have come across."

— Krauss, Nicole (b. August 18, 1974)