Date: c. 300 B.C.

"The sage's heart-mind in stillness is the mirror of Heaven and earth, the glass of the ten thousand things."

— Zhuangzi (4th century BC)

Date: c. 300 B.C.

"Perfect persons use their heart-minds like mirrors—going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing."

— Zhuangzi (4th century BC)

Date: w. c. 238

"Hence, the human heart-mind may be compared to a pan of water. If you place the pan upright and do not stir the water up, the mud will sink to the bottom, and the water on top will be clear and pure [qing ming] enough to see your beard and eyebrows and to examine the lines on your face."

— Xunzi (died after 238 BC)

Date: 250

The Soul "makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth, without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught by many mirrors"

— Plotinus (c. 205-270)

Date: 250

"When the Intellect is in upward orientation that [lower part of it] which contains [or, corresponds to] the life of the Soul, is, so to speak, flung down again and becomes like the reflection resting on the smooth and shining surface of a mirror; in this illustration, when the mirror is in place...

— Plotinus (c. 205-270)

Date: 250

"When, on the contrary, the mirror within is shattered through some disturbance of the harmony of the body, Reason and the Intellectual-Principle act unpictured: Intellection is unattended by imagination."

— Plotinus (c. 205-270)

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: 1077

"Most appropriately, therefore, the mind can be said to be its own mirror, in which it contemplates, so to speak, the image of its highest essence which it cannot see face to face."

— St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)

Date: 1273

"For the relation of phantasms to the intellect is like the relation of colors to the sense of sight, as he says De Anima iii, 5,7. Therefore, as the species of colors are in the sight, so are the species of phantasms in the possible intellect."

— St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

Date: c. 1508?

"The mind of the painter should be like a mirror which always takes the colour of the thing that it reflects and which is filled by as many images as there are things placed before it."

— Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (1452-1519)