Date: December 1840

"Perhaps a friendly Morgan le Fay will make Siegfried's castle rise again for me or show my mind's eye what heroic deeds are reserved for his sons of the nineteenth century."

— Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895)

Date: 1845

"Their minds had been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental darkness."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1851

"And so it happens that the person who reads a great deal—that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1851

"For to read in every spare moment, and to read constantly, is more paralysing to the mind than constant manual work, which, at any rate, allows one to follow one’s own thoughts."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1851

"And just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1854

"The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: September 20, 1858

"The news of the new treaty wrung from China by the allied Plenipotentiaries has, it would appear, conjured up the same wild vistas of an immense extension of trade which danced before the eyes of the commercial mind in 1845, after the conclusion of the first Chinese war."

— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)

Date: April, 1871

"Strong convictions gave him a kind of cramp in the will, and he could not act on them."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: 1878, 1879, 1880

"Neid und Eifersucht sind die Schamtheile der menschlichen Seele [Envy and jealousy are the privy parts of the human soul]."

— Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900)

Date: 1883-1885

"The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman."

— Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900)