Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701

"We can best learn how mental intuition is to be employed by comparing it with ordinary vision."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1751, 1791

"The mirrour, faithful to its charge, / Reflects the virgin's soul in large."

— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)

Date: 1764

"Such principles are parts of our constitution, no less than the power of thinking: reason can neither make nor destroy them; nor can it do any thing without them: it is like a telescope, which may help a man to see farther, who hath eyes; but without eyes, a telescope shows nothing at all."

— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)

Date: 1873

"There thou sittest in thy wonted corner / Lone and awful in thy darkened mind."

— Lowell, James Russell (1819-1891)

Date: 1876

"What art thou, Mind, that mirror'st things unseen, / Giv'st to the dead the smiles which erst they wore, / And lift'st the veil which fate hath cast between / Thee and the forms which are not, but have been?"

— Elliott, Ebenezer (1781-1849)

Date: 1949

"Self-consciousness, if the word is to be used at all, must not be described on the hallowed para-optical model, as a torch that illuminates itself by beams of its own light reflected from a mirror in its own insides."

— Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)

Date: 1992

"What we see when we take this inner look will be partly determined by the philosophical viewpoint from which we look, or, we might say, by the conceptual spectacles we may be wearing."

— Kenny, Anthony (b. 1931)

Date: 1992

"After a while, he no longer recognized what he was thinking and, just as a shop window sometimes prevents the onlooker from seeing the objects behind the glass and folds him instead in a narcissistic embrace, his mind ignored the flow of impressions from the outside world and locked him into a d...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: May 12, 2014

"For a study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, they imaged the brains of meditators while they went through four basic mental movements: focusing on a chosen target, noticing that their minds had wandered, bringing their minds back to the target, and sustaining their focus there."

— Goleman, Daniel (b. 1946)

Date: September 5, 2018

"Chief among this novel’s pleasures is viewing the nation -- its landscapes, its people, its curdled politics, its increasingly feudal inequalities -- through the vibrant filters of Gary Shteyngart’s Hipstamatic mind."

— Miles, Jonathan