Date: 380-360 B.C.

"The rest of your statement, Socrates, he said, seems excellent to me, but what you said about the soul leaves the average person with grave misgivings that when it is released from the body it may no longer exist anywhere, but may be dispersed and destroyed on the very day that the man himself d...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 1641

"I am not that structure of limbs which is called a human body. I am not even some thin vapour which permeates the limbs - a wind, fire, air, breath, or whatever I depict in my imagination; for these are things which I have supposed to be nothing."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1727

"It is without Doubt, that Fancy and Imagination form a world of Apparitions in the Minds of Men and Women; (for we must not exclude the Ladies in this Part, whatever we do) and People go away as thoroughly possess'd with the Reality of having seen the Devil, as if they convers'd Face to Face wit...

— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)

Date: 1741-2

"When no malignant fever fires the brain, / And health luxuriant revels in each vein, / Tho' sunk in sloth, from all diseases free, / In dropsies, you will run to Reeve or Lee."

— Gilbert, Thomas (bap. 1713, d. 1766)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Else wherefore burns / In mortal bosoms this unquenched hope, / That breathes from day to day sublimer things, / And mocks possession?"

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1751

"Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid / Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire."

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1755

Affections may seem benumbed or may take take fire

— Hooker [from Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language]

Date: 1756, 1793

"My heart is pregnant, and my soul on fire"

— Blacklock, Thomas (1721-1791)

Date: 1854

"There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in the girl: yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face, there was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its expression."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1922

"I plucked my soul out of its secret place, / And held it to the mirror of my eye, / To see it like a star against the sky, / A twitching body quivering in space, / A spark of passion shining on my face."

— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)