Quotes from book
Religio Medici

Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne is a spiritual testament and early psychological self-portrait. Published in 1643 after an unauthorized version was distributed the previous year, it became a European best-seller which brought its author fame at home and abroad.

“This reasonable moderator, and equal piece of justice, Death.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 38
Religio Medici (1643), Part I

“Aristotle whilst he labours to refute the ideas of Plato, falls upon one himself: for his summum bonum, is a Chimera, and there is no such thing as his Felicity.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 15
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

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

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 9
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

“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;”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 12
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

“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.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 3
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

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

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 9
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

“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.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 6
Religio Medici (1643), Part I

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

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 11
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

“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.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 34
Religio Medici (1643), Part I

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

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 12
Religio Medici (1643), Part I

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

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 51
Religio Medici (1643), Part I

“Art is the perfection of nature.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 16
Religio Medici (1643), Part I

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

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 11
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

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

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 4
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

“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.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 2
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

“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.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 9
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

“Obstinacy in a bad cause, is but constancy in a good.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 25
Religio Medici (1643), Part I

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

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 12
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

“I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof; 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, Wife, and Children stand afraid and start at us.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 40
Religio Medici (1643), Part I

“The severe Schools shall never laugh me out of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 12
Religio Medici (1643), Part I

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