Date: 1633

"If they be two, they are two so / As stiffe twin compasses are two, / Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show / To move, but doth, if the'other doe."

— Donne, John (1572-1631)

Date: 1635

"'Tis said that Polo the Tragedian / When hee on Stage to force some passion came, / Had his Sonnes ashes in an Urne enshrin'd / To worke more deepe impressions in his mind."

— Brathwaite, Richard (1587/8-1673)

Date: 1635

"Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, / But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue."

— Donne, John (1572-1631)

Date: 1636

"A man's heart is like those two-faced pictures: if you look one way towards one side of them, you shall see nothing but some horrid shape of a devil, or the like; but go to the other side and look again, and you shall see the picture of an angel or of some beautiful woman, &c."

— Goodwin, Thomas (1600-1680)

Date: 1636

"So some have looked over their hearts by signs at one time, and have to their thinking found nothing but hypocrisy, unbelief, hardness, self-seeking; but not long after, examining their hearts again by the same signs, they have espied the image of God drawn fairly upon the table of their hearts."

— Goodwin, Thomas (1600-1680)

Date: 1637

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

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1637

"Now a painter cannot represent all the different sides of a solid body equally well on his flat canvas, and so he chooses one of the principal ones, sets it facing the light, and shades the others so as to make them stand out only when viewed from the perspective of the chosen side. In just the ...

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1637

"Their [philosopher's] sole reason for positing such images was that they saw how easily a picture can stimulate our mind to conceive the objects depicted in it, and so it seemed to them that, in the same way, the mind must be stimulated, by little pictures formed in our head, to conceive the obj...

— 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: 1704

"Erect your schemes with as much method and skill as you please; yet, if the materials be nothing but dirt, spun out of your own entrails (the guts of modern brains), the edifice will conclude at last in a cobweb; the duration of which, like that of other spiders’ webs, may be imputed to their be...

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)