Thomas Browne Quotes - Page 4

There is nothing strictly immortal, but immortality. Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end.

Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plan religion.

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

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.

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

For my part, I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are witches.

The noblest Digladiation is in the Theatre of ourselves.

There are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces.

For there is a music wherever there is a harmony, order, or proportion, and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres.

The discourses of the table among true loving friends are held in strict silence.

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

A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest.

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.

Suicide is not to fear death, but yet to be afraid of life. It is a brave act of valour to contemn death; but when life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valour to dare to live; and herein religion hath taught us a noble example, for all the valiant acts of Curtius, Scarvola, or Codrus, do not parallel or match that one of Job.

He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself (Christian morals).

They do most by Books, who could do much without them, and he that chiefly owes himself unto himself, is the substantial Man.

Though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.

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.

Be Charitable before wealth make thee covetous, and loose not the glory of the Mite.

Be thou what thou singly art and personate only thyself. Swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature and live but one man.

Women do most delight in revenge.

Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while families last not three oaks.

There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read may read our natures.

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.

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.