Thomas Browne
Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Brownewas an English polymath and author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including science and medicine, religion and the esoteric. Browne's writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural world, influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian enquiry. Browne's literary works are permeated by references to Classical and Biblical sources as well as the idiosyncrasies of his own personality. Although often described as suffering from melancholia, his writings are also characterised by wit...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 October 1605
The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.
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.
I would not live over my hours past ... not unto Cicero's ground because I have lived them well, but for fear I should live them worse.
To call ourselves a Microcosme, or little world, I thought it onely a pleasant trope of Rhetorick, till my neare judgement and second thoughts told me there was a reall truth therein: for first wee are a rude masse, and in the ranke of creatures, which only are, and have a dull kinde of being not yet priviledged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existence, which comprehend the creatures not onely of world, but of the Universe.
Where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.
Not to be content with Life is the unsatisfactory state of those which destroy themselves; who being afraid to live, run blindly upon their own Death, which no Man fears by Experience.
For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.
Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us.
There is musick, even in the beauty and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument.
As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.
To treat a poor wretch with a bottle of Burgundy, and fill his snuffbox, is like giving a pair of laced ruffles to a man that has never a shirt on his back
A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.
We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.