Date: 1800

"My curiosity grew more eager, in proportion as it was supplied with food, and every day added strength to the assurance that I was no insignificant and worthless being."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

"I merely write to allay those tumults which our necessary separation produces; to aid me in calling up a little patience, till the time arrives, when our persons, like our minds, shall be united forever."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

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: 1892

"Remorse is cureless,—the disease / Not even God can heal; / For 't is his institution,-- / The complement of hell."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1922

"I plucked my soul out of its secret place, / And held it to the mirror of my eye, / To see it like a star against the sky, / A twitching body quivering in space, / A spark of passion shining on my face."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: September, 1934

"This weight of knowledge dark on the brain is never / To be burnt out like fever, // But will slowly, with speech to tell the way and ease it, / Will sink into the blood, and warm, and slowly / Move in the veins, and murmur, and come at length / To the tongue's tip and the finger's tip most lowl...

— Miles, Josephine (1911-1985)

Date: August, 1965

"His mind's all black thickets / and blood."

— Harrison, Jim (1937-2016)