On Motion (-1699)

"We invoke the imagination and the intervals that it furnishes, since the form itself is without motion or genesis, indivisible and free of all underlying matter, though the elements latent in the form are produced distinctly and individually on the screen of imagination. What projects the images is the understanding; the source of what is projected is the form in the understanding; and what they are projected in is this 'passive nous' that unfolds in revolution about the partlessness of genuine Nous." (Proclus Lycaeus, "A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements", cca 5th century)

"[…] the mind orders nothing by its own motions, but lies merely receptive under the impressions of bodies, reflecting empty images in a mirror in place of reality." (Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, "The Consolation of Philosophy", cca. 524)

"[H]ere negation is […] contrariety […] that is to say, in the contrary direction. As the west is contrary of east; and the south the converse of north. Thus, of two countries, east and west, if one be taken as positive, the other is relatively negative. So when motion to the east is assumed to be positive, if a planets motion be westward, then the number of degrees equivalent to the planets motion is negative." (Bhaskara II, "Bijaganita", 12th century)

"Sound is generated by motion, since it belongs to the class of successive things. For this reason, while it exists when it is made, it no longer exists once it has been made. […] All music, especially mensurable music, is founded in perfection, combining in itself number and sound." (Jean de Muris, "Ars novae musicae", 1319)

"Those who devised the eccentrics seen thereby in large measure to have solved the problem of apparent motions with approximate calculations. But meanwhile they introduced a good many ideas which apparently contradict the first principles of uniform motion. Nor could they elicit or deduce from the eccentrics the principal consideration, that is, the structure of the universe and the true symmetry of its parts."  (Nicolaus Copernicus, "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium", 1543)

"I tell you that if natural bodies have it from Nature to be moved by any movement, this can only be circular motion, nor is it possible that Nature has given to any of its integral bodies a propensity to be moved by straight motion. I have many confirmations of this proposition, but for the present one alone suffices, which is this. I suppose the parts of the universe to be in the best arrangement, so that none is out of its place, which is to say that Nature and God have perfectly arranged their structure. This being so, it is impossible for those parts to have it from Nature to be moved in straight, or in other than circular motion, because what moves straight changes place, and if it changes place naturally, then it was at first in a place preternatural to it, which goes against the supposition. Therefore, if the parts of the world are well ordered, straight motion is superfluous and not natural, and they can only have it when some body is forcibly removed from its natural place, to which it would then return by a straight line, for thus it appears that a part of the earth does [move] when separated from its whole. I said 'it appears to us', because I am not against thinking that not even for such an effect does Nature make use of straight line motion." (Galileo Galilei, [Letter to Francesco Ingoli] 1624)

"Although time, space, place, and motion are very familiar to everyone, it must be noted that these quantities are popularly conceived solely with reference to the objects of sense perception." (Isaac Newton, "The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", 1687)

"To measure motion, space is as necessary to be considered as time....[They] are made use of to denote the position of finite: real beings, in respect one to another, in those infinite uniform oceans of duration and space." (John Locke, "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", 1689)