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
Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.
Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks.
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.
A man may be in as just possession of the truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.
A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest.
I can cure the gout or stone in some, sooner than Divinity, Pride, or Avarice in others.
To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history.
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.
They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also virtue, for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.
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.
Light is the shadow of God.
The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority.
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.