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
Suicide is not to fear death, but yet to be afraid of life. It is a brave act of valour to contemn death; but when life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valour to dare to live; and herein religion hath taught us a noble example, for all the valiant acts of Curtius, Scarvola, or Codrus, do not parallel or match that one of Job.
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.
Sleep is death's younger brother, and so like him, that I never dare trust him without my prayers.
As sins proceed they ever multiply, and like figures in arithmetic, the last stands for more than all that wert before it.
They do most by Books, who could do much without them, and he that chiefly owes himself unto himself, is the substantial Man.
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.
Festination may prove Precipitation; Deliberating delay may be wise cunctation.
Lord deliver me from myself.
If riches increase, let thy mind hold pace with them; and think it not enough to be liberal, but munificent.
Times before you, when even the living men were Antiquities; when the living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world, could not be properly said, to go unto the greater number.
We do but learn to-day what our better advanced judgements will unteach us tomorrow.
(Death is) A leap into the dark.
That some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.
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.