No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.
Thomas BrowneRead
I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that we were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition; it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.
Interpretation
The quote expresses disdain for the act of sexual intercourse, suggesting that there are more profound and meaningful ways to create life.
Thomas Browne reflects on the nature of procreation, contemplating whether it would be preferable to reproduce without the act of sexual intercourse, which he deems trivial and foolish. He suggests that a wise individual might see the act of coition as the least dignified or significant act in the journey of life, hinting at a desire for a more majestic and philosophical approach to existence and creation.
In practice
This quote could be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of relationships and reproduction.
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.
The spirit of the kingdom undermines its defenses. People will rise against the king. A new peace is made; holy laws deteriorate. Paris has never before found herself in such dire straits.
There are worries that seem to me sustained by the love of worry. For example, that people are reading from screens, or listening to recorded books. Why scold the impulse to enjoy language and narrative in whatever form it takes?
For a man of my generation, our century has been a long intellectual and political struggle in favor of freedom.
The advocates of retaliatory wars will continue to assume a much simpler reality with their hoary oppositions: Religious and secular, backward and enlightened, free and unfree. But if we are to admit how deeply and irrevocably interconnected our world is, then we must find new ways to break the cycle of counter-productive violence.
There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
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