Quotes
Quotes - Browne
The king to Oxford sent a troop of horse, For Tories own no argument but force; With equal care, to Cambridge books he sent, For Whigs allow no force but argument.
No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.
Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave.
Gold once out of the earth is no more due unto it; what was unreasonably committed to the ground, is reasonably resumed from it; let monuments and rich fabricks, not riches, adorn men's ashes.
To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our belief.
And sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument; for there is music wherever there is harmony, order, or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres.
Rich with the spoils of nature.
There are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces.
Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.
All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.
There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherin he that cannot read A, B, C may read our natures.
Preconcieved notions are the locks on the door to wisdom. -Merry Browne.
If heaven send no supplies, The fairest blossom of the garden dies.
The first step in freeing yourself from social restrictions is the realization that there is no such thing as a "safe" code of conduct - one that would earn everyone's approval. Your actions can always be condemned by someone - for being too bold or too apathetic, for being too conformist or too nonconformist, for being too liberal or too conservative. So it's necessary to decide whose approval is important to you.
Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant religion.
Women do most delight in revenge.
When we desire to confine our words, we commonly say they are spoken under the rose. - Sir Thomas Browne,
Est rosa flos Veneris cujus quo furta laterent. [Roughly meaning, The discourses of the table among true loving friends are held in strict silence.]
Since the Brother of Death daily haunts us with dying mementoes.
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.
Think not thy time short in this world, since the world itself is not long. The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it.
The vices we scoff at in others, laugh at us within ourselves.
A wise man is out of the reach of fortune.
The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabric.
