Date: 380-360 B.C.

"'All of you in the city are certainly brothers,' we shall say to them in telling the tale, 'but god, in fashioning those of you who are competent to rule, mixed gold in at their birth; this is why they are most honored; in auxiliaries, silver, and iron and bronze in the farmers and other craftsm...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"Hence the god commands the rulers first and foremost to be of nothing such good guardians and to keep over nothing so careful a watch as the children, seeing which of these metals is mixed in their souls."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: w. 350 B.C.

"Generally, about all perception, we can say that a sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold; what produces the impression is a signet of ...

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

Date: c. 43 AD

"Those things that men's untutored hearts revere, sunk in the bondage of their bodies--jewels, gold, silver, and polished tables, huge and round--all these are earthly dross, for which the untainted spirit, conscious of its own nature, can have no love, since it is itself light and uncumbered, wa...

— Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (c. 4 B.C. - A.D. 65)

Date: 101

"'For,' it was his habit to say, 'as a stone, if you cast it upward, will be brought down to the earth by its own nature, so the man whose mind is naturally good, the more you repel him, the more he turns toward that to which he is naturally inclined.'"

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 1257

"By means of this suffering, inflicted by a real fire, the souls are cleansed of the guilt and dross of sin, and also of its sequels."

— St. Bonaventure [born Giovanni di Fidanza] (1217-1274)

Date: 1576

"Ignoraunce [...] maketh him unmeete metall for the impressions of vertue."

— Fleming, Abraham (c. 1552-1607)

Date: 1577

"The comparisons of, Ynke, and of the spirit: of stones, and of the hart, are of great force. For he expresseth more when he compareth ynke with the spirit of God, adn stones with the harte, than if he had named the spirit and the harte without comparison."

— Calvin, John (1509-1564); Timme, Thomas (fl. 1577)

Date: 1632

"Looke as it is with a Gold smith that melteth the metall that he is to make a vessell of, if after the melting thereof, there follow a cooling, it had beene as good it had never beene melted, it is as hard, haply harder, as unfit, haply unfitter, then it was before to make vessell of; but after ...

— Hooker, Richard (1554-1600)

Date: 1641

"As Lots wife was turned into a Pillar of Salt, that her inconstancie might be fixt, and yet be melting still: So, thou, my Soule, if I had my wish, shouldst be turned into a Pillar of Thoughts; that thy volubility might be restrain'd, and yet be thinking still."

— Baker, Richard, Sir (c. 1568-1645)