Date: September 10, 1836

"Nevertheless, far different from the deaf and dumb nature around them, these all rest like fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of thought and virtue whereto they alone, of all organizations, are the entrances."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: August 31, 1837

"The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: 1845

"They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1869

"His mind resembled chiefly the rugged and outstanding mountain, and yet it had characteristics which reminded you likewise of the gentle stream, flowing sweetly through the valley below."

— Sprague, William Buell (1795-1876)

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: 1911

"A friend may almost literally pour out his soul into our waiting ears, or we may almost literally read it in his eyes."

— Lewis, Edwin Herbert (1866-1938)

Date: 1958

"Consciousness is like a bottomless lake in which ideas are suspended at different depths."

— Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839-1914)

Date: 1976

"They [Marsall McLuhan's ideas] are Turkish baths of the mind."

— Bell, Daniel (1919-2011)

Date: 1979

" But they can be sent along the usual channels […] until at some critical point, a "mental faucet" is closed, preventing them from actually being carried out."

— Hofstadter, Douglas (b. 1945)

Date: 1981

"When we introspect we do not perceive 'concepts' flowing through our minds as such. Stop the stream of thought when or where we will, what we catch are words, images, sensations, feelings."

— Putnam, Hilary (b. 1926)