Date: October 10, 1869

"Recitations alone readily degenerate into dusty repetitions, and lectures alone are too often a useless expenditure of force. The lecturer pumps laboriously into sieves. The water may be wholesome, but it runs through."

— Eliot, Charles William (1834-1926)

Date: January, 1884

"As a snowflake-crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency and pa...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: January, 1884

"If this "solidarity" of the stream of feelings is all that is meant by the Ego, -- if the Ego is merely a name for that fact, -- well and good, -- we seem agreed!"

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"The flowing life of the mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with long Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct existence."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1922

"The joy in your maturity at length, / The peace that filled my soul like cooling wine, / When you responded to my tender strength, / And pressed your heart exulting into mine."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)

Date: 1946

"Icebergs behoove the soul / (both being self-made from elements least visible) / to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible."

— Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

Date: 1947, 1958

"Religion, ethics, metaphysics – these are merely the 'spiritual' and 'inner' festivals of human anguish, ways of channelling the black waters of anxiety – and towards what abyss?"

— Lefebvre, Henri (1901-1991)

Date: 1949

"It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes."

— Orwell, George (1903-1950)

Date: 1979

" But they can be sent along the usual channels […] until at some critical point, a "mental faucet" is closed, preventing them from actually being carried out."

— Hofstadter, Douglas (b. 1945)

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)