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: 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: 1979
" But they can be sent along the usual channels […] until at some critical point, a "mental faucet" is closed, preventing them from actually being carried out."
preview | full record— Hofstadter, Douglas (b. 1945)
Date: March 11, 2011
"The huge submerged bulk of the mental iceberg, with its stores of memory and acquired skills that have become automatic, like language, driving and etiquette, supplies people with the raw materials on which they can exercise their reason and decide what to think and what to do."
preview | full record— Nagel, Thomas (b. 1937)
Date: May 28, 2023
"This is an acid bath for human cognition"
preview | full record— Klein, Ezra (b. May 9, 1984)