Top 160 Thomas Browne Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We do but learn to-day what our better advanced judgements will unteach us tomorrow.”

— Thomas Browne

52. “Rich with the spoils of nature.”

— Thomas Browne

53. “Sleep is death’s younger brother, and so like him, that I never dare trust him without my prayers.”

— Thomas Browne

54. “What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.”

— Thomas Browne

55. “Where I cannot satisfy my reason, I love to humour my fancy.”

— Thomas Browne

56. “There is music wherever there is harmony, order and proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.”

— Thomas Browne

57. “But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.”

— Thomas Browne

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

— Thomas Browne

59. “Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.”

— Thomas Browne

60. “Since women do most delight in revenge, it may seem but feminine manhood to be vindictive.”

— Thomas Browne

61. “There are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces.”

— Thomas Browne

62. “No man can justly censure or condemn another, because indeed no man truly knows another.”

— Thomas Browne

63. “It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many million faces, there should be none alike.”

— Thomas Browne

64. “I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof, ’tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures.”

— Thomas Browne

65. “I am in no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company, yet in one dream I can compose a whole Comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof.”

— Thomas Browne

66. “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

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

— Thomas Browne

68. “I love to lose myself in a mystery to pursue my reason to an O altitudo.”

— Thomas Browne

69. “The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabric.”

— Thomas Browne

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

— Thomas Browne

71. “But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us.”

— Thomas Browne

72. “Affection should not be too sharp eyed, and love is not made by magnifying glasses.”

— Thomas Browne

73. “We term sleep a death by which we may be literally said to die daily; in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers.”

— Thomas Browne

74. “There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole world about him.”

— Thomas Browne

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

— Thomas Browne

76. “Age doth not rectify, but incurvate our natures, turning bad dispositions into worser habits.”

— Thomas Browne

77. “There is musick, even in the beauty and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument.”

— Thomas Browne

78. “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

79. “There is something in us that can be without us, and will be after us, though indeed it hath no history of what it was before us, and cannot tell how it entered into us.”

— Thomas Browne

80. “I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that we were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition; it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.”

— Thomas Browne

81. “Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while families last not three oaks.”

— Thomas Browne

82. “I had rather stand the shock of a basilisk than the fury of a merciless pen.”

— Thomas Browne

83. “Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest unto others.”

— Thomas Browne

84. “The man without a navel still lives in me.”

— Thomas Browne

85. “Oblivion is not to be hired: The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in the record of man.”

— Thomas Browne

86. “A diamond, which is the hardest of stones, not yielding unto steel, emery or any other thing, is yet made soft by the blood of a goat.”

— Thomas Browne

87. “Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plan religion.”

— Thomas Browne

88. “Passion against Reason, Reason against Faith, Faith against the Devil, and my Conscience against all.”

— Thomas Browne

89. “Were the happiness of the next world is as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live.”

— Thomas Browne

90. “Let any stranger find mee so pleasant a county, such good way, large heath, three such places as Norwich, Yar. and Lin. in any county of England, and I’ll bee once again a vagabond to visit them.”

— Thomas Browne

91. “Let the fruition of things bless the possession of them, and take no satisfaction in dying but living rich.”

— Thomas Browne

92. “For God is like a skilfull Geometrician.”

— Thomas Browne

93. “Oblivion is not to be hired.”

— Thomas Browne

94. “Be thou what thou singly art and personate only thyself. Swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature and live but one man.”

— Thomas Browne

95. “Miserable men commiserate not themselves; bowelless unto others, and merciless unto their own bowels.”

— Thomas Browne

96. “Women do most delight in revenge.”

— Thomas Browne

97. “If riches increase, let thy mind hold pace with them; and think it not enough to be liberal, but munificent.”

— Thomas Browne

98. “As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine; methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith.”

— Thomas Browne

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

— Thomas Browne

100. “A man may be in as just possession of the truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.”

— Thomas Browne