Date: 1793

"If, with the 'mind's eye,' she had a taste to travel through distant kingdoms and take a retrospective view of past events, she might nourish that fondness for variety so predominant with human nature, and in the indulgence of this disposition be happy."

— Anonymous [By an American Lady]

Date: September 10, 1836

"What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest, — and all to form the Hand of the mind;...

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: September 10, 1836

"When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added, grace and expression."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: 1845

"Their minds had been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental darkness."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1854

"The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1966, 1968

"'You're the least important person in the room and don't forget it,' Jessica Mitford's governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inn...

— Didion, Joan (b. 1934)

Date: Summer, 1991

"Elinor's pupils, those less tractable sphincters of the soul, won't close against the hapless hemorrhaging of her visual attention-flow toward Marianne; it is this, indeed, that renders her consciousness, in turn, habitable, inviting, and formative to readers as 'point-of-view.'"

— Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950-2009)

Date: August 12/19, 2002

"In his mind's eye he can see himself coolly flipping the garlic and pepper T-bones on the front acreage of his new grill while carefully testing the citrus-tarragon trout filets that sizzle fragrantly in the rear."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)

Date: 2006

"While the amygdala's role as a sentinel and trigger for distress is old news to neuroscience, its social role, as part of the brain's system for emotional contagion, has been revealed only recently."

— Goleman, Daniel (b. 1946)

Date: 2010

"One bore the Professorial stigmata, if only brainular, for years."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)