Top 100 Thomas Browne Quotes
#1. I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that we were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition; it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.
Thomas Browne
#3. To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history.
Thomas Browne
#4. For my part, I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are witches.
Thomas Browne
#5. If riches increase, let thy mind hold pace with them; and think it not enough to be liberal, but munificent.
Thomas Browne
#6. Study prophecies when they are become histories.
Thomas Browne
#7. With what shift and pains we come into the World we remember not; but 'tis commonly found no easy matter to get out of it.
Thomas Browne
#8. These are O Lord the humble desires of my most reasonable ambition and all I dare call happinesse on earth: wherein I set no rule or limit to thy hand or providence. Dispose of me according to the wisdome of thy pleasure. Thy will bee done, though in my owne undoing.
Thomas Browne
#9. To believe only possibilities is not faith, but mere philosophy.
Thomas Browne
#10. The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in; I feel sometimes a hell within myself.
Thomas Browne
#11. 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.
Thomas Browne
#13. 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.
Thomas Browne
#15. That some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.
Thomas Browne
#16. No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.
Thomas Browne
#17. The vices we scoff at in others laugh at us within ourselves.
Thomas Browne
#18. There is nothing strictly immortal, but immortality. Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end.
Thomas Browne
#19. Sleep is death's younger brother, and so like him, that I never dare trust him without my prayers.
Thomas Browne
#20. The noblest Digladiation is in the Theatre of ourselves.
Thomas Browne
#21. Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all.
Thomas Browne
#22. Were every one employed in points concordant to their natures, professions, and arts, commonwealths would rise up of themselves.
Thomas Browne
#23. Were the happiness of the next world is as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live.
Thomas Browne
#24. Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion, wherein stones and clouts make martyrs.
Thomas Browne
#25. 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.
Thomas Browne
#26. Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors ...
Thomas Browne
#27. The discourses of the table among true loving friends are held in strict silence.
Thomas Browne
#28. Where I cannot satisfy my reason, I love to humour my fancy.
Thomas Browne
#29. 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.
Thomas Browne
#30. Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plan religion.
Thomas Browne
#31. 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.
Thomas Browne
#32. To be content with death may be better than to desire it.
Thomas Browne
#33. But to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration.
Thomas Browne
#34. Should your riches increase, let your mind keep pace with them.
Thomas Browne
#35. Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world.
Thomas Browne
#36. With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but 'tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it.
Thomas Browne
#37. If reason is a rebel unto faith, so is passion unto reason.
Thomas Browne
#38. Festination may prove Precipitation;
Deliberating delay may be wise cunctation.
Thomas Browne
#39. We censure others but as they disagree from that humor which we fancy laudable in ourselves, and commend others but for that wherein they seem to quadrate and consent with us.
Thomas Browne
#40. I have tried if I could reach that great resolution ... to be honest without a thought of Heaven or Hell.
Thomas Browne
#41. There is musick, even in the beauty and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument.
Thomas Browne
#43. As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine; methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith.
Thomas Browne
#44. For there is a music wherever there is a harmony, order, or proportion, and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres.
Thomas Browne
#45. There is in those workes of nature, which seeme to puzle reason, something Divine, and that hath more in it then the eye of a common spectator doth discover.
Thomas Browne
#46. They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also virtue, for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.
Thomas Browne
#47. Do the devils lie? No; for then even hell could not subsist.
Thomas Browne
#48. To make an end of all things on Earth, and our Planetical System of the World, he (God) need but put out the Sun.
Thomas Browne
#49. Miserable men commiserate not themselves; bowelless unto others, and merciless unto their own bowels.
Thomas Browne
#50. We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases
Thomas Browne
#51. God hath varied the inclinations of men according to the variety of actions to be performed.
Thomas Browne
#52. Age doth not rectify, but incurvate our natures, turning bad dispositions into worser habits.
Thomas Browne
#53. What then is the wisdom of the times called old? Is it the wisdom of gray hairs? No. It is the wisdom of the cradle.
Thomas Browne
#54. Let any stranger find mee so pleasant a county, such good way, large heath, three such places as Norwich, Yar. and Lin. in any county of England, and I'll bee once again a vagabond to visit them.
Thomas Browne
#55. Rough diamonds may sometimes be mistaken for worthless pebbles.
Thomas Browne
#56. We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all disease.
Thomas Browne
#57. Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?
Thomas Browne
#58. 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.
Thomas Browne
#59. I can cure the gout or stone in some, sooner than Divinity, Pride, or Avarice in others.
Thomas Browne
#61. All things began in Order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again, according to the Ordainer of Order, and the mystical mathematicks of the City of Heaven.
Thomas Browne
#62. 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.
Thomas Browne
#63. Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.
Thomas Browne
#64. By compassion we make others' misery our own, and so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also.
Thomas Browne
#65. He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself (Christian morals).
Thomas Browne
#66. Gold once out of the earth is no more due unto it; what was unreasonably committed to the ground, is reasonably resumed from it; let monuments and rich fabricks, not riches, adorn men's ashes.
Thomas Browne
#67. There is another man within me that's angry with me.
Thomas Browne
#69. Where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.
Thomas Browne
#70. Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while families last not three oaks.
Thomas Browne
#72. 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.
Thomas Browne
#73. Many-have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth.
Thomas Browne
#74. I have loved my friends as I do virtue, my soul, my God.
Thomas Browne
#75. 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.
Thomas Browne
#76. 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.
Thomas Browne
#77. It is the common wonder of all men, how, among so many million faces, there should be none alike.
Thomas Browne
#78. All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.
Thomas Browne
#79. To me avarice seems not so much a vice as a deplorable piece of madness.
Thomas Browne
#80. Nor do they speak properly who say that time consumeth all things; for time is not effective, nor are bodies destroyed by it.
Thomas Browne
#81. We do but learn to-day what our better advanced judgements will unteach us tomorrow.
Thomas Browne
#82. Think before you act; think twice before you speak.
Thomas Browne
#83. We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.
Thomas Browne
#84. I had rather stand the shock of a basilisk than the fury of a merciless pen.
Thomas Browne
#85. There is no royal road or ready way to virtue.
Thomas Browne
#86. Since women do most delight in revenge, it may seem but feminine manhood to be vindictive.
Thomas Browne
#87. There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole world about him.
Thomas Browne
#88. Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good.
Thomas Browne
#89. There is something in us that can be without us, and will be after us, though indeed it hath no history of what it was before us, and cannot tell how it entered into us.
Thomas Browne
#90. Charity But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world; yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.
Thomas Browne
#91. I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasure, of knowledge; 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.
Thomas Browne
#92. Not to be content with Life is the unsatisfactory state of those which destroy themselves; who being afraid to live, run blindly upon their own Death, which no Man fears by Experience.
Thomas Browne
#93. That miracles have been, I do believe; that they may yet be wrought by the living, I do not deny; but I have no confidence on those which are fathered on the dead.
Thomas Browne
#94. Gardens were before gardeners, and but some hours after the earth.
Thomas Browne
#95. The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity' something quite different, relating to the planet's life-span, not individual life-span.
Thomas Browne
#96. There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.
Thomas Browne
#97. Think not silence the wisdom of fools; but, if rightly timed, the honor of wise men, who have not the infirmity, but the virtue of taciturnity.
Thomas Browne
#98. Flattery is a juggler, and no kin unto sincerity.
Thomas Browne
#99. Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks.
Thomas Browne
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