Date: 1887

"You see, he explained, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose."

— Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)

Date: 1887

"A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it."

— Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)

Date: 1891

"For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?"

— Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills (1854-1900)

Date: 1898

"Silently we went round and round, / And through each hollow mind / The Memory of dreadful things / Rushed like a dreadful wind, / And Horror stalked before each man, / And Terror crept behind."

— Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills (1854-1900)

Date: 1892, 1899

"In admitting a new body of experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas."

— James, William (1842-1910)

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: 1892, 1899

"But be our conceptions adequate or inadequate, and be our stock of them large or small, they are all we have to work with."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"The more adequate the stock of ideas, the more 'able' is the man, the more uniformly appropriate is his behavior likely to be."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"This mental escort which the mind supplies is drawn, of course, from the mind's ready-made stock."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1900

"Who stamped us with the minting die / Of this unconquerable need / To know the unknown Deity / And name the nameless in a creed?"

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