Date: 58

"As in a tilled-field, when ploughed for corn, some flowers are found amongst it, and yet, though these posies may charm the eye, all this labour was not spent in order to produce them--the man who sowed the field had another object in view he gained this over and above it--so pleasure is not [th...

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

Date: 58

"As we hunt wild beasts with toil and peril, and even when they are caught find them an anxious possession, for they often tear their keepers to pieces, even so are great pleasures: they turn out to be great evils and take their owners prisoner."

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

Date: w. c. 63 A.D.

"Moreover, we ought not to allow our desires to wander far afield, but we must make them confine themselves to our immediate neighbourhood, since they will not endure to be altogether locked up."

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

Date: c. 65 A.D.

"He is the true freeman who has escaped from bondage to self. That slavery is constant, from it there is no deliverance."

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

Date: 167

"[T]hou canst at a moment's notice retire into thyself"

— Marcus Aurelius (121-180)

Date: 537, 1533

"celas etiam ut ita dixerim, speculum mentis [mirror of mind] tuae, ubi te omnis aetas ventura possit inspicere."

— Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus(c. 484/490 - c. 585)

Date: 1718

"Epicurus, that it [sperm] is a Fragment torn from the Body and Soul."

— Plutarch (c. 46-120)

Date: 1718

""Lausippus and Zeno, [sperm] 'tis a Body, and it is a Fragment of the Soul."

— Plutarch (c. 46-120)

Date: 1718

"Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, that the Spermatick Faculty is incorporeal, as the Mind is which moves the Body, but the effused Matter is corporeal."

— Plutarch (c. 46-120)

Date: 1718 [first published 1684-1694]

"And not our Houses alone, when (as SOPHOCLES has it) they stand long untenanted, run the faster to ruine, but Mens natural parts lying unemployed for lack of Acquaintance with the World, contract a kind of filth or rust and craziness thereby."

— Plutarch (c. 46-120)