Date: 1781, second ed. 1787

"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: 1781, second ed. 1787

"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: 1781, second ed. 1787

"They learned that reason only perceives that which it produces after its own design; that it must not be content to follow, as it were, in the leading-strings of nature, but must proceed in advance with principles of judgement according to unvarying laws, and compel nature to reply its questions."

— 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: 1818, 1859

"Now this is by no means possible, for as soon as we turn into ourselves to make the attempt, and seek for once to know ourselves fully by means of introspective reflection, we are lost in a bottomless void; we find ourselves like the hollow glass globe, from out of which a voice speaks whose cau...

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

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: 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: June 16, 1978

"The human head is bigger than the globe."

— Grass, Günther (b. 1927)