Date: 1925

"A man of action is likely to be a poor thinker, if a thinker at all, while the ideal of the sage, the stoic for instance, is to live detached and to keep his soul motionless like a still lake which impassively mirrors the fleeting skies."

— Ortega y Gasset, José (1883-1955)

Date: 1947, 1958

"Religion, ethics, metaphysics – these are merely the 'spiritual' and 'inner' festivals of human anguish, ways of channelling the black waters of anxiety – and towards what abyss?"

— Lefebvre, Henri (1901-1991)

Date: 1949

"The inner life is a stream of consciousness of such a sort that it would be absurd to suggest that the mind whose life is that stream might be unaware of what is passing down it."

— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)

Date: 1949

"True, the evidence adduced recently by Freud seems to show that there exist channels tributary to this stream, which run hidden from their owner."

— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)

Date: 1949

"Rather, to relapse perforce into simile, it is supposed that mental processes are phosphorescent, like tropical sea-water, which makes itself visible by the light which it itself emits."

— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)

Date: 1958

"Consciousness is like a bottomless lake in which ideas are suspended at different depths."

— Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839-1914)

Date: 1976

"They [Marsall McLuhan's ideas] are Turkish baths of the mind."

— Bell, Daniel (1919-2011)

Date: 1979

" But they can be sent along the usual channels […] until at some critical point, a "mental faucet" is closed, preventing them from actually being carried out."

— Hofstadter, Douglas (b. 1945)

Date: 1981

"When we introspect we do not perceive 'concepts' flowing through our minds as such. Stop the stream of thought when or where we will, what we catch are words, images, sensations, feelings."

— Putnam, Hilary (b. 1926)

Date: 1983

"Hume's account of mental happenings is geographical in the broadest sense, a description of human economy and ecology, not just a record of topography and a positioning of land masses but a marking of the tidal movements and trade routes of the mind as it negotiates for ease and stability."

— Richetti, John (b. 1938)