Thomas Browne

No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.

Content may dwell in all stations. To be low but above contempt may be high enough to be happy.

Thus there are two books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other.

To be content with death may be better than to desire it.

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us.

Had not almost every man suffered by the Press, or were not the tyranny thereof become universal, I had not wanted reason for complaint.

We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

There are wonders in true affection. It is a body of enigmas, mysteries, and riddles, wherein two so become one, as they both become two.

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude.

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.

Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humor and passion.

Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.

By compassion we make others' misery our own, and so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also.

I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Archilles; Fortune hath not one place to hit me.

To believe only possibilities is not faith, but mere Philosophy.

Let the fruition of things bless the possession of them, and take no satisfaction in dying but living rich.

Affection should not be too sharp eyed, and love is not made by magnifying glasses.

Were the happiness of the next world is as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live.

Though it be in the power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death.