Date: 1813

"O Spirit! through the sense / By which thy inner nature was apprised / Of outward shows, vague dreams have rolled, / And varied reminiscences have waked / Tablets that never fade."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1817, 1818

"My mind became the book through which I grew / Wise in all human wisdom"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1817

"Not until my dream became / Like a child's legend on the tideless sand. / Which the first foam erases half, and half / Leaves legible"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1817, 1818

"Look on your mind--it is the book of fate-- / Ah! it is dark with many a blazoned name / Of misery--all are mirrors of the same"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1822

"Thou didst say thou knewest / A Jew, whose spirit is a chronicle / Of strange and secret and forgotten things."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1824

"And in my wisdom are the orbs of Heaven / Written as in a record"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1832

"The mind of a new-born infant .... so far from being, as Locke affirms, a sheet of blank paper, is ... a perfect encyclopedia, comprehending not only the newest discoveries, but all those still more valuable and wonderful inventions that will hereafter be made."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1998

"The thought scrolled round and round in his mind--it went well, it went well."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)