Top 160 Thomas Browne Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Should your riches increase, let your mind keep pace with them.”

— Thomas Browne

103. “Forcible ways make not an end of evil, but leave hatred and malice behind them.”

— Thomas Browne

104. “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.”

— Thomas Browne

105. “As sins proceed they ever multiply, and like figures in arithmetic, the last stands for more than all that wert before it.”

— Thomas Browne

106. “Many-have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth.”

— Thomas Browne

107. “True affection is a body of enigmas, mysteries and riddles, wherein two so become one that they both become two.”

— Thomas Browne

108. “The vices we scoff at in others laugh at us within ourselves.”

— Thomas Browne

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

— Thomas Browne

110. “Though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.”

— Thomas Browne

111. “It is we that are blind, not fortune; because our eye is too dim to discern the mystery of her effects, we foolishly paint her blind, and hoodwink the providence of the Almighty.”

— Thomas Browne

112. “Whosoever enjoys not this life, I count him but an apparition, though he wear about him the sensible affections of flesh. In these moral acceptions, the way to be immortal is to die daily.”

— Thomas Browne

113. “He that unburied lies wants not his hearse, For unto him a tomb’s the Universe.”

— Thomas Browne

114. “God hath varied the inclinations of men according to the variety of actions to be performed.”

— Thomas Browne

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

— Thomas Browne

116. “Had not almost every man suffered by the Press, or were not the tyranny thereof become universal, I had not wanted reason for complaint.”

— Thomas Browne

117. “Therefore for Spirits, I am so far from denying their existence that I could easily believe, that not only whole Countries, but particular persons, have their Tutelary and Guardian Angels.”

— Thomas Browne

118. “Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion, wherein stones and clouts make martyrs.”

— Thomas Browne

119. “In brief, where the Scripture is silent, the church is my text; where that speaks, ’tis but my comment; where there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason.”

— Thomas Browne

120. “I cannot tell by what logic we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly; they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express the actions of their inward forms.”

— Thomas Browne

121. “Do the devils lie? No; for then even hell could not subsist.”

— Thomas Browne

122. “Study prophecies when they are become histories.”

— Thomas Browne

123. “What then is the wisdom of the times called old? Is it the wisdom of gray hairs? No. It is the wisdom of the cradle.”

— Thomas Browne

124. “To me avarice seems not so much a vice as a deplorable piece of madness.”

— Thomas Browne

125. “Tis hard to find a whole age to imitate, or what century to propose for example.”

— Thomas Browne

126. “The discourses of the table among true loving friends are held in strict silence.”

— Thomas Browne

127. “He who must needs have company, must needs have sometimes bad company.”

— Thomas Browne

128. “I can hardly thinke there was any scared into Heaven; they go the surest way to Heaven who would serve God without a Hell; other Mercenaries, that crouch unto Him in feare of Hell, though they terme themselves servants, are indeed but the slaves of the Almighty.”

— Thomas Browne

129. “With what shift and pains we come into the World we remember not; but ’tis commonly found no easy matter to get out of it.”

— Thomas Browne

130. “There is no such thing as solitude, nor anything that can be said to be alone and by itself but God, who is His own circle, and can subsist by Himself.”

— Thomas Browne

131. “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.”

— Thomas Browne

132. “For my part, I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are witches.”

— Thomas Browne

133. “To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our belief.”

— Thomas Browne

134. “Gold once out of the earth is no more due unto it; what was unreasonably committed to the ground, is reasonably resumed from it; let monuments and rich fabricks, not riches, adorn men’s ashes.”

— Thomas Browne

135. “That miracles have been, I do believe; that they may yet be wrought by the living, I do not deny; but I have no confidence on those which are fathered on the dead.”

— Thomas Browne

136. “Flat and flexible truths are beat out by every hammer; But Vulcan and his whole forge sweat to work out Achilles his armour.”

— Thomas Browne

137. “Nor do they speak properly who say that time consumeth all things; for time is not effective, nor are bodies destroyed by it.”

— Thomas Browne

138. “Yes, even amongst wiser militants, how many wounds have been given, and credits slain, for the poor victory of an opinion, or beggarly conquest of a distinction.”

— Thomas Browne

139. “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.”

— Thomas Browne

140. “The religion of one seems madness unto another.”

— Thomas Browne

141. “We censure others but as they disagree from that humor which we fancy laudable in ourselves, and commend others but for that wherein they seem to quadrate and consent with us.”

— Thomas Browne

142. “Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors...”

— Thomas Browne

143. “The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity’ something quite different, relating to the planet’s life-span, not individual life-span.”

— Thomas Browne

144. “To be content with death may be better than to desire it.”

— Thomas Browne

145. “The world, which took six days to make, is likely to take us six thousand years to make out.”

— Thomas Browne

146. “Flattery is a juggler, and no kin unto sincerity.”

— Thomas Browne

147. “I can look a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of an horse.”

— Thomas Browne

148. “That some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.”

— Thomas Browne

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

— Thomas Browne

150. “There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all things: our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks.”

— Thomas Browne