Sir Thomas Browne (1605 – 1682)
English author of varied works that disclose his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric.
I intend no Monopoly, but a Community in Learning; I study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves.
There is no road or ready way to virtue.
Art is the perfection of nature.
Rich with the spoils of Nature.
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.
Burden not the back of Aries, Leo, or Taurus, with thy faults, nor make Saturn, Mars, or Venus, guilty of thy Follies.
In the deep discovery of the Subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some enquirers.
I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret Magic of numbers.
I can cure the gout or stone in some, sooner than Divinity, Pride, or Avarice in others.
It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many million of faces there should be none alike.
We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life.
But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world, yet is every man his greatest enemy, and as it were, his own executioner.
Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? without the favour of the everlasting Register the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methusaleh's long life had been his only Chronicle.
Aristotle whilst he labours to refute the Idea's of Plato, falls upon one himself: for his summum bonum, is a Chimera, and there is no such thing as his Felicity.
The severe Schools shall never laugh me out of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible.
Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition, and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders.
How shall the dead arise, is no question of my faith; to believe only possibilities, is not faith, but mere philosophy.
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.
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.
Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant Religion.