Thomas Browne Quotes

Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dullness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.

All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven.

The quincunx of heaven runs low, and ’tis time to close the five parts of knowledge.

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living. All things fall under this name. The sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and light but the shadow of God.

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

To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history… Who would not rather have been the good thief than Pilate ?

There is no antidote against the opium of time.

’Tis too late to be ambitious.

We cannot hope to live so long in our names as some have done in their persons.

Adversity stretcheth our days.

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

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

Old mortality, the ruins of forgotten times.

Whilst I study to find how I am a microcosm of little world, I find myself something more than the great. There is surely a piece of divinity in us; something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.

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

I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there 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.

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

All places, all airs make unto me one country; I am in England, everywhere, and under any meridian.

The world was before the creation and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive. Though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain.

There is no road or ready way to virtue.