Date: 101

"Because the gods have given the vine, or wheat, we sacrifice to them: but because they have produced in the human mind that fruit by which they designed to show us the truth which relates to happiness, shall we not thank God for this?"

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 101

"Is, then, the fruit of a fig-tree not perfected suddenly and in one hour, and would you possess the fruit of a man's mind in so short a time and so easily?"

— Epictetus (c. 55-c.135)

Date: 1637

"I kept uprooting from my mind any errors that might previously have slipped into it."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1637

"I supposed, too, that in the beginning God did not place in this body any rational soul or any other thing to serve as a vegetative or sensitive soul, but rather that he kindled in its heart one of those fires without light which I had already explained, and whose nature I understood to be no di...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1652

"And truly he might as well phansie such implanted Ideas, such seeds of light in his external eye, as such seminal principles in the eye of the minde."

— Culverwell, Nathanael (bap. 1619, d. 1651)

Date: 1686, 1689, 1697

"How doth Reason exert it self by little and little, what Helps and Arts are there us'd to make the Flower open and shew it self to the World?"

— Nourse, Timothy (c.1636–1699)

Date: 1704

"Now I confess I am of Opinion, that the Mind is so far from being a Rasa Tabula, that it is plentifully furnished with all Ideas of Truth, which are the Seeds and Principles of all Knowledge we have, or ever shall have; that we cannot form any one true Notion, but what is founded in some ...

— Sherlock, William (1639/40-1707)

Date: 1748

"This was the true, the sole, the genuine Way of proceeding; for while carnal Desires, and such an over-weening Passion for Riches remained, their Breasts were barren Grounds, and thereby most unfit to receive the Seed of Divine Truths."

— Anonymous; [Lyttleton]

Date: December 10, 1774; 1775

"The mind is but a barren soil; is a soil soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilised and enriched with foreign matter."

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: December 10, 1790; 1791

"It is an absurdity therefore to suppose we are born with this taste, though we are with the seeds of it, which by the heat and kindly influence of his genius, may be ripened in us."

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)