Date: 1774, rev. 1787, 1779 in English

"And yet I wish--Oh! my friend, 'tis like drawing a curtain before my heart--only to taste this felicity, and die and expiate my crimes.--My crimes!"

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749-1832)

Date: 1805-6, published 1833-6

"At such a time, when the encircling crust, like a soulless decaying tenement, crumbles away, and spirit displays itself arrayed in new youth, the seven league boots are at length adopted"

— Hegel, G. W. F. (1770-1831)

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

"The largest library in disorder is not so useful as a smaller but orderly one; in the same way the greatest amount of knowledge, if it has not been worked out in one’s own mind, is of less value than a much smaller amount that has been fully considered."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1911

"The psychical is divided (to speak metaphorically and not metaphysically) into monads that have no windows and are in communication only through empathy."

— Husserl, Edmund (1859-1938)

Date: 1964

"Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. ...

— Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979)

Date: 1970

"I should, rather, speak of a labyrinth. I am not concerned here with what is installed in the chamber at its enigmatic centre, ego or fate, but all the more with the many entrances leading into the interior."

— Benjamin, Walter (1892-1940)

Date: 2001

"[T]his is how it is described in the book Le Jardin des Plantes, in which Claude Simon descends once more into the storehouse of memories, and on page 235 begins to tell the fragmentary tale of a certain Gastone Novelli who, like Améry, was subjected to this particular form of torture."

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"Memories like this came back to me in the disused Ladies' Waiting Room of Liverpool Street Station, memories behind and within which many things much further back in the past seemed to lie, all interlocking like the labyrinthine vaults I saw in the dusty gray light, and which seemed to go on and...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"I walked around this place, said Austerlitz, his left hand pointing to the tall brick façade of the hospital building towering behind the wall, in the curiously remote state of mind induced by the drugs I was being given; both desolate and weirdly contented I wandered, all through that winter, u...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)