Quotes from Sir Thomas Browne

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.

To make an end of all things on Earth, and our Planetical System of the World, he (God) need but put out the Sun.

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and the light but the shadow of God.

Quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests.

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.

To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history.

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

Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things.

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

A Dialogue between two Infants in the womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Plato's Den, and are but Embryon Philosophers.

Happy are they that go to bed with grave music.

Sleep is a death; oh, make me try By sleeping what it is to die, And as gently lay my head On my grave as now my bed!

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living. All things fall under this name. The sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and light but the shadow of God.

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

There is no road or ready way to virtue.

The inequity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.

All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven.