Date: c. 1603

"Just when the human mind, borne thither by some favouring gale, had found rest in a little truth, this man presumed to cast the closest fetters on our understandings."

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

Date: c. 1603

"By your vague inductions you took men's minds off their guard and weakened their mental sinews."

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

Date: c. 1603

"When, however, you gave out the falsehood that truth is, as it were, the native inhabitant of the human mind and need not come in from, outside to take up its abode there; when you turned our minds away from observation, away from things, to which it is impossible we should ever be sufficiently ...

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

Date: c. 1603

"In fact, had not political conditions and prospects put an end to these mental voyages, many another coast of error would have been visited by those mariners."

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

Date: c. 1603

"The fact is, my son, that the human mind in studying nature becomes big under the impact of things and brings forth a teeming brood of errors."

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

Date: c. 1603

"On waxen tablets you cannot write anything new until you rub out the old. With the mind it is not so; there you cannot rub out the old till you have written in the new."

— Bacon, Sir Francis, Lord Verulam (1561-1626)

Date: 1603

"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, / And enterprises of great pith and moment / With this regard their currents turn awry, / And lose the name of action."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1603

"Give me that man / That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him / In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, / As I do thee."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1604

"[W]e know not how soone our Lord and master will call us to a reckoninge and therefore it behoveth us to have our accompts alwayes perfect and the bookes of our consciences made up in readinesse."

— Downham, John (1571-1652)

Date: 1604, 1622

A thought may, "like a poisonous mineral," gnaw one's inwards

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)