Date: 1798

"On the contrary, if, to entice him to enter the paths of knowledge, we strew them with flowers, how will he feel when he must force his way through thorns and briars?"

— Edgeworth, Maria

Date: 1830

"To grasp intelligence as this night-like mine or pit in which is stored a world of infinitely many images and representations, yet without being in consciousness, is from the one point of view the universal postulate which bids us treat the notion as concrete, in the way we treat, for example, t...

— Hegel, G. W. F. (1770-1831)

Date: 1850

"Caverns there were within my mind which sun / Could never penetrate, yet did there not / Want store of leafy arbours where the light / Might enter in at will."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1928, 1978

"Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his m...

— Benjamin, Walter (1892-1940)

Date: August, 1965

"His mind's all black thickets / and blood."

— Harrison, Jim (1937-2016)

Date: 2000

"As I breathed in I could feel my consciousness expanding along a glistening spider's web of total connectedness and as I exhaled it accordioned back into the tropical richness of my body, the streams and rivers of my blood."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)