Date: 1588

"Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest and keeps incessantly whirling arounnd building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like our silkworms, and is suffocated in it."

— Montaigne, Michel Eyquem seigneur de (1533-1592)

Date: 1793

"It is here that the mind holds its empire, though it is impossible to demonstrate how this is effected, and beyond this point its power ceases."

— Valli, Eusebius (1762-1815)

Date: 1793

"The empire of the mind is extended by experience and practice."

— Valli, Eusebius (1762-1815)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be co...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"After all, it is the life that tells; and mind-cure has developed a living system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all previous literature of the 'Diätetik der Seele' into the shade."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"Most mindcurers here bring in a doctrine that thoughts are 'forces,' and that, by virtue of a law that like attracts like, one man's thoughts draw to themselves as allies all the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"Such fleeting aspirations are mere 'velleitates,' whimsies. They exist on the remoter outskirts of the mind and the real self of the man, the centre of his energies, is occupied with an entirely different system."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"In the end we fall back on the hackneyed symbolism of a mechanical equilibrium. A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it arouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutually check or reinforce one another."

— James, William (1842-1910)