Date: 1605

"For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuff and is limited thereby; but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable fo...

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

Date: 1605, 1640

"Amongst the which this last is of special use in moral and civil matters; how, I say, to set affection against affection, and to master one by another; even as we used to hunt beast with beast, and fly bird with bird, which otherwise percase we could not so easily recover."

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

Date: 1678

"A Weak mind complains before it is overtaken with evil, and as Birds are affrighted with the noise of the Sling, so the infirm soul anticipates its troubles by its own fearful apprehensions, and falls under them before they are yet arrived."

— Wanley, Nathaniel (1634-1680)

Date: 1662, 1762

"Our soul is escaped even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler: the snare is broken, and we are delivered."

— The Church of England

Date: January 19, 1791

"But it is then, and basking in the sunshine of unmerited fortune, that low, sordid, ungenerous, and reptile souls swell with their hoarded poisons; it is then that they display their odious splendour, and shine out in full lustre of their native villainy and baseness."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1851

"And so it happens that the person who reads a great deal—that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1883-1885

"The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman."

— Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900)

Date: September 2, 2011

"We speak of exerting will power, of forcing ourselves to go to work, of restraining ourselves and of controlling our temper, as if it were an unruly dog."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: February 3, 2012

"Confronted by a vertiginous cascade of allusions, each one pointing to yet another unknown, retreating to the snail shell of the mind seems a whole lot more attractive: a poem responds to you, you don't respond to it."

— Samet, Elizabeth D.

Date: April 26, 2016

"It is by this dimension of imaginative relativity that Hogwarts, Middle Earth, Earthsea, Dickens's London, Hemingway's Paris, Didion's anxious California and the mind of Helen Oyeyemi, reclining like a sphinx between her pages in quiet and glittering sleep, all fit inside my tiny apartment, and ...

— Brennan, Summer