Date: 1958

"Consciousness is like a bottomless lake in which ideas are suspended at different depths."

— Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839-1914)

Date: 1959

"Still beneath / Live skin stone breathes, about which fires but play, / Fierce heart that is the iced brain's to command / To judgment -- studied reflex, contained breath) -- / Their best of worlds since, on the ordained day, / This world went spinning from Jehovah's hand."

— Hill, Geoffrey (b. 1932)

Date: 1975

"But at a certain age, the age at which promotions and Chairs begin to occupy a man's thoughts, he may look back with wistful nostalgia to the day's when his wits ran fresh and clear, directed to a single, positive goal."

— Lodge, David (b. 1935)

Date: 1975

"In the preceding months he had prepared himself with meticulous care, filling his mind with distilled knowledge, drop by drop, until, on the eve of the first paper (Old English Set Texts) it was almost brimming over."

— Lodge, David (b. 1935)

Date: 1975

"Each morning for the next ten days he bore his precious vessel to the examination halls and poured a measured quantity of the contents on to the pages of ruled quarto. Day by day the level fell, until on the tenth day the vessel was empty, the cup was drained, the cupboard was bare"

— Lodge, David (b. 1935)

Date: 1975

"In the years that followed he set about replenishing his mind, but it was never quite the same. The sense of purpose was lacking--there was no great Reckoning against which he could hoard his knowledge, so that it tended to leak away as fast as he acquired it."

— Lodge, David (b. 1935)

Date: 1976

"They [Marsall McLuhan's ideas] are Turkish baths of the mind."

— Bell, Daniel (1919-2011)

Date: 1979

" But they can be sent along the usual channels […] until at some critical point, a "mental faucet" is closed, preventing them from actually being carried out."

— Hofstadter, Douglas (b. 1945)

Date: 1981

"When we introspect we do not perceive 'concepts' flowing through our minds as such. Stop the stream of thought when or where we will, what we catch are words, images, sensations, feelings."

— Putnam, Hilary (b. 1926)

Date: 1983

"Hume's account of mental happenings is geographical in the broadest sense, a description of human economy and ecology, not just a record of topography and a positioning of land masses but a marking of the tidal movements and trade routes of the mind as it negotiates for ease and stability."

— Richetti, John (b. 1938)