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
As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.
Light that makes things seen, makes some things invisible.
Come, fair repentance, daughter of the skies! Soft harbinger of soon returning virtue; The weeping messenger of grace from heaven.
Natura nihil agit frustra [Nature does nothing in vain] is the only indisputible axiom in philosophy. There are no grotesques in nature; not any thing framed to fill up empty cantons, and unncecessary spaces.
Sleep is a death, O make me try By sleeping, what it is to die, And as gently lay my head On my grave, as now my bed.
Rough diamonds may sometimes be mistaken for worthless pebbles.
Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude.
No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.
Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good.
The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.
To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history.
They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also virtue, for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.
We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life.
To me avarice seems not so much a vice as a deplorable piece of madness.