Date: c. 1603

"But do you suppose, when all the approaches and entrances to men's minds are beset and blocked by the most obscure idols -- idols deeply implanted and, as it were, burned in -- that any clean and polished surface remains in the mirror of the mind on which the genuine natural light of things can ...

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

Date: c. 1603

"Just when the human mind, borne thither by some favouring gale, had found rest in a little truth, this man presumed to cast the closest fetters on our understandings."

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

Date: c. 1603

"By your vague inductions you took men's minds off their guard and weakened their mental sinews."

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

Date: c. 1603

"When, however, you gave out the falsehood that truth is, as it were, the native inhabitant of the human mind and need not come in from, outside to take up its abode there; when you turned our minds away from observation, away from things, to which it is impossible we should ever be sufficiently ...

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

Date: c. 1603

"In fact, had not political conditions and prospects put an end to these mental voyages, many another coast of error would have been visited by those mariners."

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

Date: c. 1603

"The fact is, my son, that the human mind in studying nature becomes big under the impact of things and brings forth a teeming brood of errors."

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

Date: c. 1603

"On waxen tablets you cannot write anything new until you rub out the old. With the mind it is not so; there you cannot rub out the old till you have written in the new."

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

Date: 1604

"How are the Soule and Body, Spirite and Flesh coupled together, what chaynes, what fetters imprison a spirituall Substance, an immortal Spirit in so base, stinking; and corruptible a carkasse?"

— Wright, Thomas (c. 1561-1623)

Date: 1604

"For, as the Ratte running behinde a paynted cloth, betrayeth her selfe; even so, a Passion lurking in the heart, by thoughts and speech discovereth it selfe, according to the common Proverbe, ex abundantia cordis os loquitur, from the aboundance of heart, the tongue speaketh: for as a Riv...

— Wright, Thomas (c. 1561-1623)

Date: 1605

"But from whatsoever root or cause this restiveness of mind proceedeth, it is a thing most prejudicial; and nothing is more politic than to make the wheels of our mind concentric and voluble with the wheels of fortune."

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