Date: 1790

"Their view calls off his attention from his own view; and his breast is, in some measure, becalmed the moment they come into his presence. This effect is produced instantaneously and, as it were, mechanically; but, with a weak man, it is not of long continuance."

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)

Date: 1791

"I cannot allow any fragment whatever that floats in my memory concerning the great subject of this work to be lost."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1794

"With shadowy trident how Volition guides, / Surge after surge, his intellectual tides; / Or, Queen of Sleep, Imagination roves / With frantic Sorrows, or delirious Loves."

— Bilsborrow, Dewhurst (fl. 1794)

Date: 1799

"My thoughts flowed with tumult and rapidity."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1803

"And all the floating thoughts we find / Upon the surface of the mind."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: August 1817

"Whenever any object takes such a hold on the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in love, or kindling it to a sentiment of admiration;--whenever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, ...

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: 1820

"And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the win...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1892, 1899

"The flowing life of the mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with long Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct existence."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1902

"Those traits which float like foam on the surface of a man's being should be put in this category."

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

Date: 2008

"There is tremendous precision and gentleness in the practice: the precision of noticing what is happending, the waterfall of thought; the gentleness of being nonjudgmental, not rejecting the busy mind. Over time, acknowledging that we are thinking and coming back to breath, the waterfall gradual...

— Barker, Phil