Date: August 1817

"There is no natural harmony in the ordinary combinations of significant sounds: the language of prose is not the language of music, or of passion: and it is to supply this inherent defect in the mechanism of language--to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo ...

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: 1819

"He who saves me from this conclusion, who makes a mock of this doctrine, and sets at nought its power, is to me not less than the God of my idolatry, for he has left one drop of comfort in my soul."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

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)