Date: c. 501 B.C.

"[He used to say that] there is a greater need to extinguish hybris than there is a blazing fire."

— Heraklitus (fl. 504-1 BCE)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"The rest of your statement, Socrates, he said, seems excellent to me, but what you said about the soul leaves the average person with grave misgivings that when it is released from the body it may no longer exist anywhere, but may be dispersed and destroyed on the very day that the man himself d...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: w. 350 B.C.

"This is what led Democritus to say that soul is a sort of fire or hot substance; his 'forms' or atoms are infinite in number; those which are spherical he calls fire and soul, and compares them to the motes in the air which we see in shafts of light coming through windows."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

Date: 101

One should be cautious in his intimacies because, "[f]or if a man places a piece of quenched charcoal close to a piece that is burning, either the quenched charcoal will quench the other, or the burning charcoal will light that which is quenched."

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 170

"The heart is, as it were, the hearthstone and source of the innate heat by which the animal is governed."

— Galen (129-200)

Date: 1257

"In its burning desire, the soul becomes not only an agile flame swift to rise: it even transcends itself, entering mystical darkness and ecstasy through a certain wise unknowing."

— St. Bonaventure [born Giovanni di Fidanza] (1217-1274)

Date: 1257

"By means of this suffering, inflicted by a real fire, the souls are cleansed of the guilt and dross of sin, and also of its sequels."

— St. Bonaventure [born Giovanni di Fidanza] (1217-1274)

Date: 1605, 1640

"But the poets and writers of histories are the best doctors of this knowledge; where we may find painted forth, with great life, how affections are kindled and incited; and how pacified and refrained; and how again contained from act and further degree; how they disclose themselves; how they wor...

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

Date: 1607

"[Y]our continuance after in all studious actions, constancy in your fauours and kind disposition (for I must needs say as hee of Augustus -- 'Rarus tu quidem ad recipiendas amicitias, ad retinendas vero constantissimus') these incited mee to cause that which as a sparke lay shrowded in embers in...

— Walkington, Thomas (b. c. 1575, d. 1621)

Date: 1632

"Looke as it is with a Gold smith that melteth the metall that he is to make a vessell of, if after the melting thereof, there follow a cooling, it had beene as good it had never beene melted, it is as hard, haply harder, as unfit, haply unfitter, then it was before to make vessell of; but after ...

— Hooker, Richard (1554-1600)