Date: c. 501 B.C.

"It is difficult to fight with one's heart's desire. Whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of soul."

— Heraklitus (fl. 504-1 BCE)

Date: c. 43 AD

"It is the mind that makes us rich; this goes with us into exile, and in the wildest wilderness, having found there all that the body needs for its sustenance, it itself overflows in the enjoyment of its own goods."

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

Date: 101

"I mean the things which belong to him as a man, the marks (stamps) in his mind with which he came into the world, such as we seek also on coins, and if we find them, we approve of the coins, and if we do not find the marks, we reject them."

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 1603

"This is the very coinage of your brain."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: w. c. 90, trans. 1611

"For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

— Matthew the Evangelist

Date: 1640

"Hexamater's no sterling, and I feare / What the brain coines goes scarce for currency there"

— Randolph, Thomas (bap. 1605, d. 1635)

Date: 1641

"Now admittedly, it is not necessary that I ever light upon any thought of God; but whenever I do choose to think of the first and supreme being, and bring forth the idea of God from the treasure house of my mind as it were, it is necessary that I attribute all perfections to him, even if I do no...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1647

"False Coin with which th'Impostor cheats us still; / The Stamp and Colour good, but Metal ill!"

— Cowley, Abraham (1618-1667)

Date: 1651, 1668

"The Latins called accounts of money rationes, and accounting ratiocinatio; and that which we in bills or books of account call items, they call nomina, that is names; and thence it seems to proceed, that they extended the word ratio to the faculty of reckoning in all other things."

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)

Date: 1651, 1668

"For words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the mony of fooles, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other Doctor whatsoever, if but a man."

— Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)