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: 1860

"Maggie Tulliver, you perceive was by no means that well-trained, well-informed young person that a small female of eight or nine necessarily is in these days: she had only been to school a year at St Ogg's, and had so few books that she sometimes read the dictionary; so that in travelling over h...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"She read so eagerly and constantly in her three books, the Bible, Thomas-a-Kempis, and the 'Christian Year' (no longer rejected as a 'hymn-book') that they filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories; and she was too ardently learning to see all nature and life in the light of h...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: April, 1871

"Intensity. This is the main cause why the ideas that flash on the minds of seers, as in Scott's description, are believed; they come mostly when the nerves are exhausted by fasting, watching and longing; they have a peculiar brilliancy, and therefore they are believed."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: April, 1871

"Constantly impressed ideas are brought back by the world around us, and if they are so often, get so tied to our other ideas that we can hardly wrench them away."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: April, 1871

"His belief in Mahomet, in the Koran, and in the sufficiency of the Koran, came to him probably in spontaneous rushes of emotion; there may have been little vestiges of argument floating here and there, but they did not justify the strength of the emotion, still less did they create it, and they ...

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: January, 1884

"Our mental life, like a bird's life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"Now the first difficulty of introspection is that of seeing the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion be reached, it so ...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, an...

— James, William (1842-1910)