Date: May, 1781

"This schematism of our understanding in regard to phenomena and their mere form, is an art, hidden in the depths of the human soul, whose true modes of action we shall only with difficulty discover and unveil."

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: May, 1781

"Thus much only can we say: 'The image is a product of the empirical faculty of the productive imagination--the schema of sensuous conceptions (of figures in space, for example) is a product, and, as it were, a monogram of the pure imagination a priori, whereby and according to which images first...

— Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)

Date: 1800

"The inner world, his microcosmus, is / The deep shaft, out of which they spring eternally."

— Schiller, Friedrich (1759-1805)

Date: 1805-6, published 1833-6

"Knowledge itself is in fact the unity and truth of both moments; but with Kant the thinking understanding and sensuousness are both something particular, and they are only united in an external, superficial way, just as a piece of wood and a leg might be bound together by a cord."

— Hegel, G. W. F. (1770-1831)

Date: 1851

"Just as a spring, through the continual pressure of a foreign body, at last loses its elasticity, so does the mind if it has another person’s thoughts continually forced upon it."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1867

"As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital."

— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)

Date: June 16, 1978

"The human head is bigger than the globe."

— Grass, Günther (b. 1927)

Date: 2001

"And now, whenever I see a photograph of Wittgenstein somewhere or other, I feel more and more as if Austerlitz were gazing at me out of it, and when I look at Austerlitz it is as if I see in him the disconsolate philosopher, a man locked into the glaring clarity of his logical thinking as inextr...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"Both ideas were right in a way at the time, since the new station was literally rising from the ruins of the old Liverpool Street; in any case, the crucial point was hardly this speculation in itself, which was really only a distraction, but the scraps of memory beginning to drift through the ou...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"And the sweet fragrance wafting up from the walled garden, the waxing moon already in the sky above the rooftops, the sound of church bells ringing down in the city, and the yellow façade of the tailor's house with its green balcony where Moravec, who as Vera told me had died long ago, frequentl...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)