Date: 1600

"And when the mind is quickened, out of doubt / The organs, though defunct and dead before, / Break up their drowsy grave and newly move / With casted slough and fresh legerity."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1603

"A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1603

"My father--methinks I see my father ... In my mind's eye."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

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: w. 1610-11, 1623

"You cram these words into mine ears against / The stomach of my sense."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1611-12, 1623

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased; / Pluck from the memory of a rooted sorrow; / Raze out the written troubles of the brain; / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?"

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1664

"The fancy, memory, and judgment are then extended (like so many limbs) upon the rack; all of them reaching with their utmost stress at nature; a thing so almost infinite and boundless, as can never fully be comprehended, but where the images of all things are always present."

— Dryden, John (1631-1700)

Date: 1666

"Slow as a Drug, that in the body lies, / Our Phansy works; yours, like a Spirit, flyes"

— Killigrew, Sir William (bap. 1606, d. 1695)

Date: 1671

"Ay, on my Conscience and Soul the Palat of his Judgement is down; and by the way how do'st like that Metaphor or rather Catachresis?"

— Shadwell, Thomas (1642-1692)

Date: 1672

"[A]ll these threatning storms which, like impregnant Clouds, do hover o'er our heads, (when they once are grasp'd but by the eye of reason) melt into fruitful showers of blessings on the people."

— Villiers, George, Second Duke of Buckingham (1628-1687)