Date: w. 1821, 1840

"These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sister...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

Poetry "reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: December 1840

"Perhaps a friendly Morgan le Fay will make Siegfried's castle rise again for me or show my mind's eye what heroic deeds are reserved for his sons of the nineteenth century."

— Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious p...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1841

"It is the solar system of the mind."

— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)

Date: 1843

"Pleasure is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative film; we develop it later, when we are at home and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom, the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people."

— Kierkegaard, Søren (1813-1855)

Date: w. btw. April and August, 1844

"Logic -- mind's coin of the realm, the speculative or mental value of man and nature -- its essence which has grown totally indifferent to all real determinateness, and hence unreal -- is alienated thinking, and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and from real man: abstract thinking."

— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)