Date: 1850

"The relation discovered, must be something remote from all the common tracks and sheep-walks made in the mind."

— Smith, Sydney (1771-1845)

Date: 1850

"Behold an emblem of our human mind / Crowded with thoughts that need a settled home, / Yet, like to eddying balls of foam / Within this whirlpool, they each other chase / Round and round, and neither find / An outlet nor a resting-place!"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1850

"The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1850

"No familiar shapes / Remained, no pleasant images of trees, / Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; / But huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men, moved slowly through the mind / By day, and were a trouble to my dreams."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1851

"No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards."

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: 1851

"The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run."

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: 1851

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. It is the same as the pupil, in learning to write, following with his pen the lines that have been pencilled by the teacher."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1851

"But, in reading, our head is, however, really only the arena of some one else’s thoughts."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1851

"And so it happens that the person who reads a great deal—that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)