Thomas Browne Quotes
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As sins proceed they ever multiply, and like figures in arithmetic, the last stands for more than all that wert before it.
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Death hath a thousand doors to let out life. I shall find one.
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Let him have the key of thy heart, who hath the lock of his own.
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If riches increase, let thy mind hold pace with them; and think it not enough to be liberal, but munificent.
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Art is the perfection of nature, ... nature is the art of God.
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Let the fruition of things bless the possession of them, and take no satisfaction in dying but living rich.
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Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while families last not three oaks.
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There are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces.
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A diamond, which is the hardest of stones, not yielding unto steel, emery or any other thing, is yet made soft by the blood of a goat.
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Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world.
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We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.
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Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plan religion.
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The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.
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Sleep is death's younger brother, and so like him, that I never dare trust him without my prayers.
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Men that look no further than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once.
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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.
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Should your riches increase, let your mind keep pace with them.
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I love to lose myself in a mystery to pursue my reason to an O altitudo.
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We term sleep a death by which we may be literally said to die daily; in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers.
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Since women do most delight in revenge, it may seem but feminine manhood to be vindictive.
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The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority.
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Yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.
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All the wonders you seek are within yourself.
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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.
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I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with me in that from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myself.
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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.
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To call ourselves a Microcosme, or little world, I thought it onely a pleasant trope of Rhetorick, till my neare judgement and second thoughts told me there was a reall truth therein: for first wee are a rude masse, and in the ranke of creatures, which only are, and have a dull kinde of being not yet priviledged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existence, which comprehend the creatures not onely of world, but of the Universe.
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Be thou what thou singly art and personate only thyself. Swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature and live but one man.
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How shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves?
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Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all.
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