Date: 1854

"While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?"

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1854

"And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1858

"His faculties were so well balanced and combined, that his constitution, free from excess, was tempered evenly with all the elements of activity, and his mind resembled a well-ordered commonwealth."

— Bancroft, George (1800-1891)

Date: 1869

"His mind resembled chiefly the rugged and outstanding mountain, and yet it had characteristics which reminded you likewise of the gentle stream, flowing sweetly through the valley below."

— Sprague, William Buell (1795-1876)

Date: October 10, 1869

"Recitations alone readily degenerate into dusty repetitions, and lectures alone are too often a useless expenditure of force. The lecturer pumps laboriously into sieves. The water may be wholesome, but it runs through."

— Eliot, Charles William (1834-1926)

Date: 1889

"The story is a fiction, -- the coinage of the brain, -- the book a reality."

— Hare, John Innes Clark (1816-1905)

Date: 1893

A woman's nature "is like a great house full of rooms ... and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes."

— Wharton, Edith (1862-1937)

Date: 1906

"From the old-world point of view, the American had no mind; he had an economic thinking-machine which could work only on a fixed line. "

— Adams, Henry (1838-1918)

Date: 1906

"The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest."

— Adams, Henry (1838-1918)

Date: 1911

"The crystalloid minds are all that's clear, orderly, and beautiful."

— Lewis, Edwin Herbert (1866-1938)