Date: MS. 1640, 1650

"[T]here is no doubt, if the true doctrine concerning the law of nature, and the properties of a body politic, and the nature of law in general, were perspicuously set down, and taught in the Universities, but that young men, who come thither void of prejudice, and whose minds are yet as white pa...

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: MS. 1640, 1650

"For certainly men are not otherwise so unequal in capacity as the evidence is unequal of what is taught by the mathematicians, and what is commonly discoursed of in other books: and therefore if the minds of men were all of white paper, they would almost equally be disposed to acknowledge whatso...

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1651, 1668

"For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life?"

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1651, 1668

"And therefore of absurd and false affirmations, in case they be universal, there can be no understanding, though many think they understand them, when they do but repeat the words softly, or con them in their mind."

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1651, 1668

"For though the nature of what we conceive be the same, yet the diversity of our reception of it, in respect of different constitutions of body and prejudices of opinion, gives everything a tincture of our different passions."

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1651, 1668

"This decaying sense, when we would express the thing itself (I mean fancy itself), we call imagination, as I said before; but when we would express the decay, and signify that the sense is fading, old, and past, it is called memory."

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1651, 1668

"When a body is once in motion, it moveth (unless something else hinders it) eternally; and whatsoever hindreth it, cannot in an instant, but in time and by degrees, quite extinguish it"

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1651, 1668

"And as we see in the water, though the wind cease, the waves give not over rolling for a long time after, so also it happeneth in that motion which is made in the internal parts of a man, then when he sees, dreams, &c"

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1651, 1668

Imagination is a "decaying sense:" "And as we see in the water, though the wind cease, the waves give not over rolling for a long time after, so also it happeneth in that motion which is made in the internal parts of a man, then when he sees, dreams, &c"

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1651, 1668

"For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as ...

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)