Date: 1733-4

"Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; / Reason's comparing balance rules the whole."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1733-4

"Self-Love but serves the virtuous Mind to wake, / As the small Pebble stirs the peaceful Lake, / The Centre mov'd, a Circle strait succeeds, / Another still, and still another spreads."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1748, 1754

"But when [the mind] soars above mortal Cares and mortal Pursuits, into the Regions of Divinity, and converses with the greatest and best of Beings, it spreads itself into a wider Compass, takes higher Flights in Reason and Goodness, and becomes God-like in its Air and Manners."

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1761, 1765

"But, after Fancy's eagle-flights were o'er, / And heav'n-illumin'd Genius could no more; / Thus, conscious all his best essays how vain, / Might the rapt bard conclude his humble strain."

— Stevenson, William (1730-1783)

Date: 1784

"Thy piercing thought / Unaided saw each movement of the mind, / As skilful artists view the small machine, / The secret springs and nice dependencies, / And to thy mimic scenes, by fancy wrought / To such a wond'rous shape, th'impassion'd breast / In floods of grief, or peals of laughter bow'd, ...

— Jago, Richard (1715-1781)

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: November 22, 1990

"One is not an immaterial soul, floating around in a machine."

— Sacks, Oliver (b. 1933)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"As all the thoughts and images of consciousness began to move in directions over which I had no control, and I seemed to be lying there watching them, like a kind of lazy sheepdog of the mind, I knew sleep was around the corner."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: March 19, 2015

"When students are tackling a task like that, you can feel the whirr and hum of thought: it feels woven of reciprocity, willing, ambition, the impulse to translate fugitive thoughts into communication with others."

— Warner, Marina (b. 1946)

Date: September 22, 2015

"This is not to say that "Tender Torrent" wasn't "fun" (it seems to be out of print today, the most enduring form of censorship); but for me, its greatest entertainment value lay in returning it to its owner, aware of the lewd visions that seethed beneath her sunny exterior. And really, that perc...

— Schillinger, Liesl