Thomas Browne Quotes

They burnt not children before their teeth appeared, as apprehending their bodies too tender a morsel for fire, and that their gristly bones would scarce leave separable relicks after the pyral combustion. That they kindled not fire in their houses for some days after was a strict memorial of the late afflicting fire. And mourning without hope, they had an happy fraud against excessive lamentation, by a common opinion that deep sorrows disturb their ghosts.

We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.

In the deep discovery of the Subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some enquirers;

Be charitable before Wealth makes thee covetous.

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.

We carry with us the wonders, we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.

They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also vertue, for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.

There is surely a piece of Divinity within us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun.

This visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes.

All cannot be happy at once, for because the glory of one State depends upon the ruine of another, there is a revolution and vicissitude of their greatnesse, which must obey the swing of that wheele, not moved by Intelligences, but by the hand of God, whereby all Estates arise to their Zenith and vertical points, according to their predestinated periods. For the lives not onely of men but of Commonweales, and the whole World, nin not upon an Helix that still enlargeth, but on a Circle where arriving to their Meridian, they decline in obscurity, and fall under the Horizon againe.

Who will not commend the wit of astrology? Venus, born out of the sea, hath her exaltation in Pisces.

We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life.

There is no road or ready way to virtue.

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

they go the fairest way to Heaven that would serve God without a Hell