Date: 1900

"But thought that strives to reunite / In polished facets of the mind / The broken colours of the light / Baffled in mists of human kind."

— Money-Coutts, Francis Burdett Thomas, 5th Lord Latimer (1852-1923)

Date: 1908

"His mind is like a sunbeam which has fallen into a globe of crystal and clear water, and all the colors are there in it, except one, which is constancy."

— Gregorio Martinez Sierra (1881-1947)

Date: 1914

"A light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind."

— Joyce, James (1882-1941)

Date: 1922

"Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds."

— Joyce, James (1882-1941)

Date: 1922

"I plucked my soul out of its secret place, / And held it to the mirror of my eye, / To see it like a star against the sky, / A twitching body quivering in space, / A spark of passion shining on my face."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: 1922

"All night, through the eternity of night, / Pain was my portion though I could not feel. / Deep in my humbled heart you ground your heel, / Till I was reft of even my inner light, / Till reason from my mind had taken flight, / And all my world went whirling in a reel."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: w. 1936, 1938

"The year plunges into night / and the heart plunges / lower than night // to an empty, windswept place / without sun, stars or moon / but a peculiar light as of thought // that spins a dark fire-- / whirling upon itself until, / in the cold, it kindles // to make a man aware of nothing / that he...

— Williams, William Carlos (1883-1963)

Date: 1937

"Yes, the gadget mind is useful in its place; it can do many things. But the spiritual mind, God-illumined, is the hope of the race."

— Newton, Joseph Fort (1876-1950)

Date: 1941, 1942

"I think that his [the poet's] function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: 1949

"Self-consciousness, if the word is to be used at all, must not be described on the hallowed para-optical model, as a torch that illuminates itself by beams of its own light reflected from a mirror in its own insides."

— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)