Date: January, 1884

"I propose in this article to supplement Mr. Sully's chapter on the Illusions of Introspection, by showing what immense tracts of our inner life are habitually overlooked and falsified by our most approved psychological authorities."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1885

"For example, to express our ideas concerning their physical basis we use different metaphors--stored up ideas, engraved images, well-beaten paths."

— Ebbinghaus, Hermann (1850-1909)

Date: 1928, 1978

"Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his m...

— Benjamin, Walter (1892-1940)

Date: 1936

"Everything is sordid, shoddy, thin as pasteboard. A Coney Island of the mind."

— Miller, Henry (1891-1980)

Date: 1940

"In the deserts of the heart / Let the healing fountain start."

— Auden, W. H. (1907-1973)

Date: 1947, 1958

"Religion, ethics, metaphysics – these are merely the 'spiritual' and 'inner' festivals of human anguish, ways of channelling the black waters of anxiety – and towards what abyss?"

— Lefebvre, Henri (1901-1991)

Date: 1949

"The mind is its own place and in his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe."

— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)

Date: 1951

"And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind."

— Bradbury, Ray (1920-2012)

Date: 1952

De la partie la plus noire de mon âme, à travers la zone hachurée me monte ce désir d'être tout à coup blanc [Out of the blackest part of my soul, through the zone of hachures, surges up this desire to be suddenly white].

— Fanon, Frantz (1925-1961)

Date: 1955, 1958

"It [the title of this book] is used out of context but expresses the way I felt about these poems when I wrote them---as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul."

— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)