Thomas Browne citations

“We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.”

“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.”

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

“I thanke God for my happy Dreams|dreames, as I doe for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happinesse; and surely it is not a melancholy conceite to thinke we are all asleepe in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as meare dreames to those of the next, as the Phantasmes of the night, to the conceit of the day. There is an equall delusion in both, and the one doth but seeme to bee the embleme or picture of the other;”

“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.”

“I can cure the gout or stone in some, sooner than Divinity, Pride, or Avarice in others”

“I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with me in that, from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myself.”

“Happy are they that go to bed with grave music like Pythagoras.”

“And surely, he that hath taken the true Altitude of Things, and rightly calculated the degenerate state of this Age, is not like to envy those that shall live in the next, much less three or four hundred Years hence, when no Man can comfortably imagine what Face this World will carry.”

“Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition, and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders.”

“Thus is man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in diverse elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds.”

“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 the light but the shadow of God.”

“The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.”

“I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret Magic of numbers.”

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

“Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? Without the favour of the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle.”

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

“I look upon you as a gem of the old rock.”

“Art is the perfection of nature.”

“In the deep discovery of the Subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some enquirers.”

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

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

“But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth præcogitations; making Cables of Cobwebbes and Wildernesses of handsome Groves. Beside Hippocrates hath spoke so little and the Oneirocriticall Masters, have left such frigid Interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of Paradise it self. Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dulnesse 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.”

“The noblest Digladiation is in the Theatre of ourselves.”

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

“There is surely a Physiognomy, which those experienced and Master Mendicants observe… For there are mystically in our faces certain Characters that carry in them the motto of our Souls, wherein he that cannot read A. B. C. may read our natures.”

“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 act of coition; It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.”