Date: w. 1821, 1840

"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1845

"No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1845

"Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1845

"I then presented an appearance enough to affect any but a heart of iron."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1854

"They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be co...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"We must class him, like Bunyan and Tolstoy, amongst those upon whose soul the iron of melancholy left a permanent imprint."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1902

"If it were otherwise, no one could even set down on paper a closely reasoned argument, for the attention would be skipping like a stone hurrying down a sharp incline, or it would be moving hither and thither like a helpless shuttlecock at the mercy of eager players."

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

Date: 1911

"I shall here have to change my metaphor a little to get the process in his mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good...

— Hulme, T. E. (1883-1917)

Date: 1911

" I have no material clay to mould to the given shape; the only thing which one has for the purpose, and which acts as a substitute for it, a kind of mental clay, are certain metaphors modified into theories of aesthetic and rhetoric."

— Hulme, T. E. (1883-1917)