Thomas Browne Quotes

Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plan religion.

A man may be in as just possession of the truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

Whosoever enjoys not this life, I count him but an apparition, though he wear about him the sensible affections of flesh. In these moral acceptions, the way to be immortal is to die daily.

He who must needs have company, must needs have sometimes bad company.

No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.

We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

The created World is but a small Parenthesis in Eternity.

Think it more satisfactory to live richly than die rich.

Yes, even amongst wiser militants, how many wounds have been given, and credits slain, for the poor victory of an opinion, or beggarly conquest of a distinction.

And surely, he that hath taken the true Altitude of Things, and rightly calculated the degenerate state of this Age, is not like to envy those that shall live in the next, much less three or four hundred Years hence, when no Man can comfortably imagine what Face this World will carry.

All the wonders you seek are within yourself.

I would not live over my hours past ... not unto Cicero's ground because I have lived them well, but for fear I should live them worse.

Times before you, when even the living men were Antiquities; when the living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world, could not be properly said, to go unto the greater number.

Therefore for Spirits, I am so far from denying their existence that I could easily believe, that not only whole Countries, but particular persons, have their Tutelary and Guardian Angels.

Do the devils lie? No; for then even hell could not subsist.

I envy no man that knows more than myself, but pity them that know less.

Since women do most delight in revenge, it may seem but feminine manhood to be vindictive.

There is another man within me that's angry with me.

It is we that are blind, not fortune.

It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many million faces, there should be none alike.

Were the happiness of the next world is as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live.

Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible.

There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.

Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.

I am in no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company, yet in one dream I can compose a whole Comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof.

For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.

The world, which took six days to make, is likely to take us six thousand years to make out.

The noblest Digladiation is in the Theatre of ourselves.

Age doth not rectify, but incurvate our natures, turning bad dispositions into worser habits.

Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us.

To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our belief.

I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Archilles; Fortune hath not one place to hit me.

I intend no Monopoly, but a Community in Learning; I study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves.

The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabric.

Thus there are two books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other.

To call ourselves a Microcosme, or little world, I thought it onely a pleasant trope of Rhetorick, till my neare judgement and second thoughts told me there was a reall truth therein: for first wee are a rude masse, and in the ranke of creatures, which only are, and have a dull kinde of being not yet priviledged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existence, which comprehend the creatures not onely of world, but of the Universe.

Yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.

I can hardly thinke there was any scared into Heaven; they go the surest way to Heaven who would serve God without a Hell; other Mercenaries, that crouch unto Him in feare of Hell, though they terme themselves servants, are indeed but the slaves of the Almighty.

Miserable men commiserate not themselves; bowelless unto others, and merciless unto their own bowels.

Oblivion is not to be hired: The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in the record of man.

For God is like a skilfull Geometrician.

There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole world about him.

Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion, wherein stones and clouts make martyrs.

I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret magick of numbers.

Every Country hath its Machiavel.

Where we desire to be informed 'tis good to contest with men above ourselves; but to confirm and establish our opinions, 'tis best to argue with judgments below our own, that the frequent spoils and victories over their reasons may settle in ourselves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our own.

There is a rabble among the gentry as well as the commonalty; a sort of plebeian heads whose fancy moves with the same wheel as these men?in the same level with mechanics, though their fortunes do sometimes gild their infirmities and their purses compound for their follies.

The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority.