Date: January, 1884

"If this "solidarity" of the stream of feelings is all that is meant by the Ego, -- if the Ego is merely a name for that fact, -- well and good, -- we seem agreed!"

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"A difference of intimacy, of warmth, of continuity, similar to the difference between a sense-perception and something merely imagined -- which seems to point to a special content in each several stream of consciousness, for which Ego is perhaps the best specific name"

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1890

"A 'river' or a 'stream' is the metaphor by which" consciousness "is most naturally described" so that one may talk of "the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"The flowing life of the mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with long Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct existence."

— James, William (1842-1910)

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: 1902

"Those traits which float like foam on the surface of a man's being should be put in this category."

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

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: 1911

"A friend may almost literally pour out his soul into our waiting ears, or we may almost literally read it in his eyes."

— Lewis, Edwin Herbert (1866-1938)

Date: 1914

"I think with all his purity Emerson had within him the turbid stream of passion and desire; for all his hard-cut granite features he knew the instincts of the weakling and the slave; and for all his sweetness, he had the tiger and the jackal in his soul."

— de Cleyre, Voltairine (1866-1912)

Date: 1920

"To use a metaphor, it is as if the activity of the suppressed body of experience is accompanied by an affective disturbance which boils over on certain occasions, so that some of the steam reaches the conscious level, while the main disturbance still continues to be wholly cut off from conscious...

— Rivers, William H. R. (1864-1922)