Date: 1851

"The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run."

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: 1855, 1856

"Ah, these currents spin one's head round almost as much as they do the ship."

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: August 6 and 20, 1859

"The jaded cart-horse of the commonplace bourgeois mind falters of course in confusion in front of the ditch separating substance from appearance, and cause from effect; but one should not ride carthorses if one intends to go coursing over the very rough ground of abstract reasoning."

— Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895)

Date: 1868

"Over me the billows roll, / Swallow up my sinking soul."

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: April 26 1870

"You'd not believe by what strange roads / Thought travels, when your beauty goads / A man to-night to think of toads."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: 1888

"It matters not how strait the gate, / How charged with punishments the scroll, / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul."

— Henley, William Ernest (1849-1903)

Date: 1892

"Futile the winds / To a heart in port,-- / Done with the compass, / Done with the chart."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1902

"Looking back upon our own thought, we observe no Subject, like an admiral on the bridge of his flagship, dictating and controlling, some man above the man or in the man; we only note a process of development which requires no such assumption."

— Spiller, Gustav (1864-1940)

Date: 1922

"Though they didn't see eye to eye in everything a certain analogy there somehow was as if both minds were travelling, so to speak, in the one train of thought."

— Joyce, James (1882-1941)

Date: Feb. 1, 2023

"Everyone has the capacity to overthink — but a sign of trouble is if your thoughts become so persistent that they're like 'a car without brakes,' he said."

— Hannah Seo