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.
What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.
Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.
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.
The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in; I feel sometimes a hell within myself.
Happy are they that go to bed with grave music like Pythagoras..
When we desire to confine our words, we commonly say they are spoken under the rose.
I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof; 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, Wife, and Children stand afraid and start at us.
A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest.
I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar act of coition; It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.
To keep our eyes open longer were but to set our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsy at that hour which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbering thoughts at that time, when sleep itself must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again?
We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
That Vulcan gave arrows unto Apollo and Diana the fourth day after their Nativities, according to Gentile Theology, may pass for no blind apprehension of the Creation of the Sun and Moon, in the work of the fourth day.
The created World is but a small Parenthesis in Eternity.
That children dream not the first half year, that men dream not in some countries, with many more, are unto me sick men's dreams, dreams out of the Ivory gate, and visions before midnight.
This reasonable moderator, and equal piece of justice, Death.
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it.
There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole world about him.
I believe the world grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor will ever perish upon the ruins of its own principles.
There is surely a piece of Divinity within us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun.
To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history.