Date: 1901-2, 1902

"Few people who have not expressly reflected on the matter realize how constantly this factor of inhibition is upon us, how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent within the cavity of a jar."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1904

"When you wish to instruct be brief, that men's minds may take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of the brimming mind."

— T.H.L.L.

Date: 1907

"No matter how much we may talk of the preservation of psychical dispositions, nor how many metaphors we may summon to characterize the storage of ideas in some hypothetical deposit chamber of memory, the obstinate fact remains that when we are not experiencing a sensation or an idea it is, stric...

— Angell, James Rowland (1869-1949)

Date: 1908, 1911

"The soul of a good man had become empty of all psychological content, of grounds and consequences; it has become a pure white slate, upon which fate writes its absurd command, and this command will be followed blindly, rashly, and fiercely to the end."

— Lukács, Georg [György] (1885-1971)

Date: 1922

"The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together."

— Eliot, T. S. (1888-1965)

Date: April 15, 1971

"You've got a geranium in your cranium."

— Lederer, Esther [Ann Landers] (1918-2002)

Date: 1984

"It is never entirely true that you don’t give a shit what others say about you, but you must throw it out of your mind."

— Baldwin, James (1924-1987)

Date: 1999

"Human beings are somehow already situated in such a way that what they need in order to cope with things is distributed around them where they need it, not packed away like a trunk full of objects, or even carefully indexed in a filing cabinet."

— Dreyfus, Hubert L. (b. 1929)

Date: February 20, 2000

"I sometimes fancy that various archetypal situations circled tirelessly in Hitchcock's mind, like whales in a tank at the zoo."

— Ebert, Roger (1942-2013)