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: April 26 1870

"Enough to throw one's thoughts in heaps / Of doubt and horror,—what to say / Or think,—this awful secret sway, / The potter's power over the clay!"

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: April 26 1870

"Between the threads fine fumes arise / And shape their pictures in the brain."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: 1871

"Tis prudent to correct mens mistakes without altering their language. This makes truth glide into their souls insensibly."

— Berkeley, George (1685-1753)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about all his own interests except the retention of his snuffbox, concerning which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"Poor Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"In the beginning of dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from the mass of a magistrate's mind fell too noticeably."

— 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

"There are cases where our intellect has gone through the arguments, and we give a clear assent to the conclusions. But our minds seem dry and unsatisfied."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)

Date: April, 1871

"There are, it is true, some minds which a mathematician might describe as minds of 'contrary flexure,' whose particular bent it is to contradict what those around them say."

— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)