Date: January, 1884

"But as the distribution of brain-tension shifts from one relative state of equilibrium to another, like the aurora borealis or the gyrations of a kaleidoscope, now rapid and now slow, is it likely that the brain's faithful psychic concomitant is heavier-footed than itself, that its rate of chang...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892

"Somebody observes the Moon through a telescope. I compare the Moon itself to the meaning; it is the object of the observation, mediated by the real image projected by the object glass in the interior of the telescope, and by the retinal image of the observer. The former I compare to the sense, t...

— Frege, Gottlob (1848-1925)

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: 1907

"'I see a Horse, I'm sure thats true.' / I say the Devil a Horse see You; / You see a Horse's Image, lain / In Miniature upon your brain; / But what you take for fourteen hand, / Is less than half a grain of sand."

— Prior, Matthew (1664-1721)

Date: 1913

"But there was a twist in his brain which made his pictures of real life appear like scenes looked at through flawed glass."

— Gosse, Edmund (1849-1928)

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: 1925

"A man of action is likely to be a poor thinker, if a thinker at all, while the ideal of the sage, the stoic for instance, is to live detached and to keep his soul motionless like a still lake which impassively mirrors the fleeting skies."

— Ortega y Gasset, José (1883-1955)

Date: 1927

"The way in which the self is unveiled to itself in the factical Dasein can nevertheless be fittingly called reflection, except that we must not take this expression to mean what is commonly meant by it--the ego bent around backward and staring at itself--but an interconnection such as is manifes...

— Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976)

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)

Date: 1979

"The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations--some accurate, some not--and capable of being studied by pure, non-empirical methods."

— Rorty, Richard (1931-2007)