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: April, 1871

"Many beliefs, in Coleridge's happy phrase, slumber in the 'dormitory of the soul'; they are present to the consciousness, but they incite to no action."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: 1877

"For in their bond of mutual recognition or brain-consciousness, the sense apparatus, in all, is external to the centre storehouse or emporium of consciousness."

— Battye, Richard Fawcett

Date: January, 1888

"The past is all of one texture--whether feigned or suffered--whether acted out in three dimensions, or only witnessed in that small theatre of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long, after the jets are down, and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed in the remainder of the body."

— Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894)

Date: January, 1888

"So that the little people who manage man's internal theatre had not as yet received a very rigorous training; and played upon their stage like children who should have slipped into the house and found it empty, rather than like drilled actors performing a set piece to a huge hall of faces."

— Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894)

Date: January, 1888

"For myself--what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with the conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the gener...

— Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894)

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: 1900, 1901

"We move amidst generalities and symbols, as within a tilt-yard in which our force is effectively pitted against other forces; and fascinated by action, tempted by it, for our own good, on to the field it has selected, we live in a zone midway between things and ourselves, externally to things, e...

— Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859-1941)

Date: 1900

"Jealous for thy authority in thy mansion-house and outward family, but not in the least for thy authority within, in thy chiefest mansion, thy principal economy? Are the servants here to talk high and in what tone they please? Must theirs be the last word, their dictates the rules of action? O s...

— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)