Date: 1820

"When I meet with a proposition beyond finite comprehension, I abandon it as I do a weight which human strength cannot lift, and I think ignorance, in these cases, is truly the softest pillow on which I can lay my head."

— Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826)

Date: August 16, 1820

"And is not this extraordina[r]y talk for the writer of Endymion? whose mind was like a pack of scattered cards--I am pick'd up and sorted to a pip."

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: August 16, 1820

"My Imagination is a Monastery and I am its Monk--you must explain my metap^cs to yourself."

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: December 27, 1823

"Now in filling my mind with them [ideas and facts], and in warming and animating me, you would, I doubt not, do me great good. And I am one of those substances, like sealing wax and other electric bodies, which require to be warmed in order to possess the faculty of attracting objects, of coveri...

— Wilberforce, William (1759-1833)

Date: January 8, 1824

"The string you touched in your last truly kind letter has been vibrating ever since, and making music most delightful to a parent's mental ear; an organ not commonly noticed, but which is full as much in daily exercise as the mind's eye of which we speak so familiarly."

— Wilberforce, William (1759-1833)

Date: September, 1838

"The tree of my mind of its leaves is stripped, my witticisms too fine are clipped, the kernel out of the shell has been nipped."

— Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895)

Date: September, 1843

"In Germany, everything is forcibly suppressed; a real anarchy of the mind, the reign of stupidity itself, prevails there, and Zurich obeys orders from Berlin."

— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)

Date: May 27, 1943

"And, once they [the truths] have been digested and have entered into the apparatus of the mind, it is possible for most people to move fairly safely over a terrain otherwise most dangerous."

— Keynes, John Maynard (1883-1946)

Date: Jan. 9, 1958

"This in haste to get something off my muckheap of a mind."

— Beckett, Samuel (1096-1989)