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...
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701
"For the human mind has within it a sort of spark of the divine, in which the first seeds of useful ways of thinking are sown, seeds which, however neglected and stifled by studies which impede them, often bear fruit of their own accord."
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: 1765
"Modern philosophers give them other fine names and Julius Scaliger, in particular, used to call them "seeds of eternity" and also "zopyra"--meaning living fires or flashes of light hidden inside us but made visible by stimulation of the senses, as sparks can be struck by steel."
preview | full record— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious p...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)