Date: 1620

"For when we try to recollect or call a thing to mind, if we have no prenotion or perception of what we are seeking, we seek and toil and wander here and there, as if in infinite space."

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

Date: 1620

"Lastly, knowing how much the sight of man's mind is distracted by experience and history, and how hard it is at the first (especially for minds either tender or preoccupied) to become familiar with nature, I not unfrequently subjoin observations of my own, being as the first offers, inclinations...

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

Date: 1620

"For the studies of men in these places are confined and as it were imprisoned in the writings of certain authors, from whom if any man dissent he is straightway arraigned as a turbulent person and an innovator."

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

Date: 1620

"For every one (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolours the light of nature; owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authorit...

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

Date: 1620

"For whereas in this first book of aphorisms I proposed to prepare men's minds as well for understanding as for receiving what is to follow; now that I have purged and swept and levelled the floor of the mind, it remains that I place the mind in a good position and as it were in a favourable aspe...

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

Date: 1620

"And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it."

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

Date: 1621

"And such are those, whose wily, waxen minde /Takes every Seal, and sails with every Winde"

— Sylvester, Joshua (1562/3-;1618)

Date: 1621

One may have " A waxen mildnes in a steely minde"

— Sylvester, Joshua (1562/3-;1618)

Date: 1621

One may have "A soule tra-lucent in an open brest"

— Sylvester, Joshua (1562/3-;1618)

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)