Date: 1901-2, 1902

"Few people who have not expressly reflected on the matter realize how constantly this factor of inhibition is upon us, how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent within the cavity of a jar."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"Every individual soul, in short, like every individual machine or organism, has its own best conditions of efficiency. A given machine will run best under a certain steam-pressure, a certain amperage; an organism under a certain diet, weight, or exercise."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1904

"This is why I called our experiences, taken all together, a quasi-chaos."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1904

"The objective nucleus of every man's experience, his own body, is, it is true, a continuous percept."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1904

"[A]round all the nuclei of shared 'reality,' as around the Dyak's head of my late metaphor, floats the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly subjective."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1904

The empiricist universe is "like one of those dried human heads with which the Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of every description float and dangle from it, and, save that they terminate in...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: w. c. 1864, published 1929

"Experience is the Angled Road / Preferred against the Mind / By -- Paradox -- the Mind itself -- / Presuming it to lead."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1990

"But in the case of her visual experience of a tree, I want to say that she is not aware of, as it were, the mental paint by virtue of which her experience is an experience of seeing a tree."

— Harman, Gilbert (b. 1938)

Date: 1990

"Some sense datum theorists will object that Eloise is indeed aware of the relevant mental paint when she is aware of an arrangement of color, because these sense datum theorists assert that the color she is aware of is inner and mental and not a property of external objects."

— Harman, Gilbert (b. 1938)

Date: 2000

"Emotions, atavisms, would be set aside, while reason -- the nabob of all faculties -- went about its work."

— Amis, Martin (b. 1949)