Date: 1902
"An image is like the painter's Madonna or the sculptor's Diana: it is the result of delicate workmanship."
preview | full record— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)
Date: 1911
"As for Mr. Woodhouse, whose most famous sentences hang like texts in frames on the four walls of our memories, he is, next to Don Quixote, perhaps the most perfect gentleman in fiction; and under outrageous provocation he remains so."
preview | full record— Bradley, A.C. (1851-1935)
Date: 1975
"The remainder [of the brain] is more like an exposed negative waiting to be dipped into developer fluid."
preview | full record— Wilson, E. O. (b. 1929)
Date: 1980
"Cause is the cement of the universe; the concept of cause is what holds together our picture of the universe, a picture that would otherwise disintegrate into a diptych of the mental and the physical."
preview | full record— Davidson, Donald (1917-2003)
Date: 1984
"In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection."
preview | full record— Gibson, William (b. 1948)
Date: 1986
"For surely, with every day that passes, our memories grow less certain, as even a statue in marble is worn away by rain, till at last we can no longer tell what shape the sculptor's hand gave it."
preview | full record— Coetzee, J. M. (b. 1940)
Date: 1986
"On the view of imagery I am sketching, the imagination systematically misinterprets in the interests of interior cinema."
preview | full record— Skulsky, Harold
Date: 1990
"But in the case of her visual experience of a tree, I want to say that she is not aware of, as it were, the mental paint by virtue of which her experience is an experience of seeing a tree."
preview | full record— Harman, Gilbert (b. 1938)
Date: 1990
"Some sense datum theorists will object that Eloise is indeed aware of the relevant mental paint when she is aware of an arrangement of color, because these sense datum theorists assert that the color she is aware of is inner and mental and not a property of external objects."
preview | full record— Harman, Gilbert (b. 1938)
Date: 1992
"Even more important to David than the very natural worry that his wife and his son might grow fond of one another was the intoxicating feeling that he had a blank consciousness to work with, and it gave him great pleasure to knead this yielding clay with his artistic thumbs."
preview | full record— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)