Top 160 Thomas Browne Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Think before you act; think twice before you speak.”

— Thomas Browne

2. “All the wonders you seek are within yourself.”

— Thomas Browne

3. “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.”

— Thomas Browne

4. “Where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.”

— Thomas Browne

5. “Light is the shadow of God.”

— Thomas Browne

6. “Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude.”

— Thomas Browne

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

— Thomas Browne

8. “Rough diamonds may sometimes be mistaken for worthless pebbles.”

— Thomas Browne

9. “Lord deliver me from myself.”

— Thomas Browne

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

— Thomas Browne

11. “Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us.”

— Thomas Browne

12. “There is another man within me that’s angry with me.”

— Thomas Browne

13. “There is no royal road or ready way to virtue.”

— Thomas Browne

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

— Thomas Browne

15. “All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.”

— Thomas Browne

16. “The service of love is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cool’d imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.”

— Thomas Browne

17. “Think not silence the wisdom of fools; but, if rightly timed, the honor of wise men, who have not the infirmity, but the virtue of taciturnity.”

— Thomas Browne

18. “Be charitable before wealth makes you covetous.”

— Thomas Browne

19. “I envy no man that knows more than myself, but pity them that know less.”

— Thomas Browne

20. “A man is never alone, not only because he is with himself and his own thoughts, but because he is with the Devil, who ever consorts with our solitude.”

— Thomas Browne

21. “Thus there are two books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other.”

— Thomas Browne

22. “To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history.”

— Thomas Browne

23. “Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.”

— Thomas Browne

24. “To believe only possibilities is not faith, but mere Philosophy.”

— Thomas Browne

25. “There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.”

— Thomas Browne

26. “For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.”

— Thomas Browne

27. “He is rich who hath enough to be charitable.”

— Thomas Browne

28. “All things began in Order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again, according to the Ordainer of Order, and the mystical mathematicks of the City of Heaven.”

— Thomas Browne

29. “As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.”

— Thomas Browne

30. “For there is a music wherever there is a harmony, order, or proportion, and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres.”

— Thomas Browne

31. “There is nothing strictly immortal, but immortality. Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end.”

— Thomas Browne

32. “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?”

— Thomas Browne

33. “Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line ure hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the Art of God.”

— Thomas Browne

34. “Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all.”

— Thomas Browne

35. “To ruminate upon evils, to make critical notes upon injuries, and be too acute in their apprehensions, is to add unto our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our enemies, to lash ourselves with the scorpions of our foes, and to resolve to sleep no more.”

— Thomas Browne

36. “Yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.”

— Thomas Browne

37. “Think not thy time short in this world, since the world itself is not long. The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it.”

— Thomas Browne

38. “Let him have the key of thy heart, who hath the lock of his own.”

— Thomas Browne

39. “The created World is but a small Parenthesis in Eternity.”

— Thomas Browne

40. “Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world.”

— Thomas Browne

41. “Death hath a thousand doors to let out life. I shall find one.”

— Thomas Browne

42. “Gardens were before gardeners, and but some hours after the earth.”

— Thomas Browne

43. “Praise is a debt we owe unto the virtue of others, and due unto our own from all whom malice hath not made mutes, or envy struck dumb.”

— Thomas Browne

44. “The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority.”

— Thomas Browne

45. “I believe the world grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor will ever perish upon the ruins of its own principles.”

— Thomas Browne

46. “A wise man is out of the reach of fortune.”

— Thomas Browne

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

— Thomas Browne

48. “Charity But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world; yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.”

— Thomas Browne

49. “I have loved my friends as I do virtue, my soul, my God.”

— Thomas Browne

50. “How shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves?”

— Thomas Browne