Date: 1851

"For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1851

"Indeed, it is the same with mental as with bodily food: scarcely the fifth part of what a man takes is assimilated; the remainder passes off in evaporation, respiration, and the like."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1851

"The largest library in disorder is not so useful as a smaller but orderly one; in the same way the greatest amount of knowledge, if it has not been worked out in one’s own mind, is of less value than a much smaller amount that has been fully considered."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1854

"And it is but a twin fact with this, that in France alone woman has had a vital influence on the development of literature; in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred; in France alone, ...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1854

"The former have more exaltation, perhaps more nobility of sentiment, and less consciousness in their intellectual activity--less of the 'femme auteur', which was Rousseau's horror in Madame d'Epinay; but the latter have a richer fund of ideas--not more ingenuity, but the materials of an addition...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1854

"Then we shall have that marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of human happiness."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1854

"The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of ideas; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneous activity; the voltaic-pile is not strong enough to produce crystallizations; phantasms of great ideas float through her mind, but she has not ...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1854

"Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1854

"Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one’s self."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1854

"They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)