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: 1851

"For to read in every spare moment, and to read constantly, is more paralysing to the mind than constant manual work, which, at any rate, allows one to follow one’s own thoughts."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1851

"And just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1854

"There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in the girl: yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face, there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its expression."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"t was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle, should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"'My dear Bounderby,' said James, dismounting, and giving his bridle to his servant, 'I do see it; and am as overcome as you can possibly desire me to be, by the spectacle afforded to my mental view.'"

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"All the journey, immovable in the air though never left behind; plain to the dark eyes of her mind, as the electric wires which ruled a colossal strip of music-paper out of the evening sky, were plain to the dark eyes of her body; Mrs. Sparsit saw her staircase, with the figure coming down."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"When I was irrevocably married, there rose up into rebellion against the tie, the old strife, made fiercer by all those causes of disparity which arise out of our two individual natures, and which no general laws shall ever rule or state for me, father, until they shall be able to direct the ana...

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: September 20, 1858

"The news of the new treaty wrung from China by the allied Plenipotentiaries has, it would appear, conjured up the same wild vistas of an immense extension of trade which danced before the eyes of the commercial mind in 1845, after the conclusion of the first Chinese war."

— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)