Date: 1603

"Yea, from the table of my memory / I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, / That youth and observation copied there, / And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain / Unmixed with baser matter."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

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: 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: 1606

"There is a ground or principle written in every mans heart in the world, none excepted, that there is a God."

— Perkins, William (1558-1602)

Date: 1609

"Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain / Full charactered with lasting memory"

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1611

The law of nature is "written in the hearts of all men"

— Sclater, William (bap. 1575, d. 1627)

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: 1615

"Afterwards, as a Merchant that had lost all his inheritance in one bottom, he was to begin the world anew, and to gather an estate or stock of knowledge, by the travel and industry of his soul and body; yet was not his soul Abrasa Tabula, a playned Table, there remained some Lineaments which the...

— Crooke, Helkiah (1576-1648)

Date: April 18, 1619

"when thy book (the history of thy life,) is torn, 1000. sins of thine own torn out of thy memory, wilt thou then present thy self thus defac'd and mangled to almighty God?"

— Donne, John (1572-1631)

Date: 1621

" It was (as I said) once well agreeing with reason, and there was an excellent consent and harmony between them, but that is now dissolved, they often jar, reason is overborne by passion: Fertur equis auriga, nec audit currus habenas, as so many wild horses run away with a chariot, and will not ...

— Burton, Robert (1577-1640)