Thomas Browne Quotes

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.

When we desire to confine our words, we commonly say they are spoken under the rose.

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.

But to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration.

Thus I call the effects of nature the works of God, whose hand & instrument she only is; and therefore to ascribe his actions unto her, is to devolve the honor of God, the principall agent, upon the instrument; which if with reason we may doe, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honour of our writings

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

Art is the perfection of nature.

To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history.
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it.

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

There is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus farre we may maintain the musick of the spheares; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the care, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatever is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaime against all Church musicke... Even that vulgar and Taverne Musicke, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in mee a deepe fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer; there is something in it of Divinity more than the eare discovers. It is an Hieroglyphicall and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and Creatures of God, such a melody to the eare, as the whole world well understood, would afford the understanding. In briefe it is a sensible fit of that Harmony, which intellectually sounds in the eares of God.

We vainly accuse the fury of guns, and the new inventions of death; it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto every one we meet he doth not kill us.

We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.

To make an end of all things on Earth, and our Planetical System of the World, he (God) need but put out the Sun

obstinacy in a bad cause, is but constancy in a good.

Our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years: generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not but three oaks.