Thomas Browne Quotes

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

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.

Rough diamonds may sometimes be mistaken for worthless pebbles.

Light is the shadow of God.

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 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.

All the wonders you seek are within yourself.

There is musick, even in the beauty and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument.

Think it more satisfactory to live richly than die rich.

We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.

A wise man is out of the reach of fortune.

By compassion we make others' misery our own, and so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also.

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.

Rich with the spoils of nature.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

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

Where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.

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.

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

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

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude.

Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks.

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

Think before you act; think twice before you speak.

Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.

There is no royal road or ready way to virtue.

As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.

The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in; I feel sometimes a hell within myself.

Forcible ways make not an end of evil, but leave hatred and malice behind them.

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world.

The created World is but a small Parenthesis in Eternity.

Women do most delight in revenge.

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

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

I have loved my friends as I do virtue, my soul, my God.

It is we that are blind, not fortune.

How shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves?

Death hath a thousand doors to let out life. I shall find one.

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

Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good.

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.

Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors.

Festination may prove Precipitation; Deliberating delay may be wise cunctation.

I cannot tell by what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly; they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express the actions of their inward forms.

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

To believe only possibilities is not faith, but mere Philosophy.

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

I had rather stand the shock of a basilisk than the fury of a merciless pen.

Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plan religion.