“It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain. Without this accomplishment, the natural expectation and desire of such a state, were but a fallacy in nature; unsatisfied considerators would quarrel the justice of their constitutions, and rest content that Adam had fallen lower; whereby, by knowing no other original, and deeper ignorance of themselves, they might have enjoyed the happiness of inferior creatures, who in tranquillity possess their constitutions, as having not the apprehension to deplore their own natures, and, being framed below the circumference of these hopes, or cognition of better being, the wisdom of God hath necessitated their contentment: but the superior ingredient and obscured part of ourselves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting contentment, will be able at last to tell us, we are more than our present selves, and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their own accomplishments.”
Source: Urne Burial
“If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition; we live with death, and die not in a moment.”
Source: Urne Burial
“All the Navel therefore and conjunctive part we can suppose in Adam, was his dependency on his Maker, and the connexion he must needs have unto heaven, who was the Sonne of God. For holding no dependence on any preceding efficient but God; in the act of his production there may be conceived some connexion, and Adam to have been in a moment all Navel with his Maker. And although from his carnality and corporal existence, the conjunction seemeth no nearer than of causality and effect; yet in his immortall and diviner part he seemed to hold a nearer coherence, and an umbilicality even with God himself. And so indeed although the propriety of this part be found but in some animals, and many species there are which have no Navell at all; yet is there one link and common connexion, one general ligament, and necessary obligation of all whatever unto God. Whereby although they act themselves at distance, and seem to be at loose; yet doe they hold a continuity with their Maker. Which catenation or conserving union when ever his pleasure shall divide, let goe, or separate, they shall fall from their existence, essence, and operations; in brief, they must retire unto their primitive nothing, and shrink into that Chaos again.”
Source: Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica
“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 fabrick 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. ’Tis not only the mischief of diseases, and the villany of poisons, that make an end of us; we vainly accuse the fury of guns, and the new inventions of death:—it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto every one we meet, he doth not kill us. There is therefore but one comfort left, that 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.”
Source: Religio Medici
“Our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years: generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not but three oaks.”
Source: Urne Burial
“Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.”
“We cannot hope to live so long in our names, as some have done in their persons, one face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. ’Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designes...We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations.”
Source: Religio Medici / Urne-Buriall
“In brief, where the Scripture is silent, the church is my text; where that speaks, 'tis but my comment; where there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason.”
Source: Religio Medici
“If there be any among those common objects of hatred which I can safely say I doe contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, vertue and religion, the multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity, which taken asunder seeme men, and the reasonable creatures of God; but confused together, make but one great beast, & a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra; it is no breach of Charity to call these fooles; it is the stile all holy Writers have afforded them, set down by Solomon in canonicall Scripture, and a point of our faith to beleeve so.”
Source: Religio Medici / Urne-Buriall
“What virtue yet sleeps in this terra damnata and aged cinders, were petty magic to experiment. These crumbling relicks and long fired particles superannuate such expectations; bones, hairs, nails, and teeth of the dead, were the treasures of old sorcerers.”
Source: Urne Burial
“He that looks for urns and old sepulchral relicks, must not seek them in the ruins of temples, where no religion anciently placed them. These were found in a field, according to ancient custom, in noble or private burial; the old practice of the Canaanites, the family of Abraham, and the burying-place of Joshua, in the borders of his possessions; and also agreeable unto Roman practice to bury by highways, whereby their monuments were under eye:--memorials of themselves, and mementoes of mortality unto living passengers; whom the epitaphs of great ones were fain to beg to stay and look upon them,--a language though sometimes used, not so proper in church inscriptions.”
Source: Urne Burial
“There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all things: our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks.”
“To be knav'd out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into pipes, to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations escaped in burning burials.”
“Some, finding many fragments of skulls in these urns, suspected a mixture of bones; in none we searched was there cause of such conjecture, though sometimes they declined not that practice.--The ashes of Domitian were mingled with those of Julia; of Achilles with those of Patroclus. All urns contained not single ashes; without confused burnings they affectionately compounded their bones; passionately endeavouring to continue their living unions. And when distance of death denied such conjunctions, unsatisfied affections conceived some satisfaction to be neighbours in the grave, to lie urn by urn, and touch but in their manes. And many were so curious to continue their living relations, that they contrived large and family urns, wherein the ashes of their nearest friends and kindred might successively be received, at least some parcels thereof, while their collateral memorials lay in minor vessels about them.”
Source: Urne Burial
“In the Jewish hypogæum and subterranean cell at Rome, was little observable beside the variety of lamps and frequent draughts of Anthony and Jerome we meet with thigh-bones and death's-heads; but the cemeterial cells of ancient Christians and martyrs were filled with draughts of Scripture stories; not declining the flourishes of cypress, palms, and olive, and the mystical figures of peacocks, doves, and cocks; but iterately affecting the portraits of Enoch, Lazarus, Jonas, and the vision of Ezekiel, as hopeful draughts, and hinting imagery of the resurrection, which is the life of the grave, and sweetens our habitations in the land of moles and pismires.”
Source: Urne Burial
“What the sun compoundeth, fire analyzeth, not transmuteth. That devouring agent leaves almost always a morsel for the earth, whereof all things are but a colony; and which, if time permits, the mother element will have in their primitive mass again.”
Source: Urne Burial
“They burnt not children before their teeth appeared, as apprehending their bodies too tender a morsel for fire, and that their gristly bones would scarce leave separable relicks after the pyral combustion. That they kindled not fire in their houses for some days after was a strict memorial of the late afflicting fire. And mourning without hope, they had an happy fraud against excessive lamentation, by a common opinion that deep sorrows disturb their ghosts.”
Source: Urne Burial
“Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live; and unto such as consider none hereafter, it must be more than death to die, which makes us amazed at those audacities that durst be nothing and return into their chaos again. Certainly such spirits as could contemn death, when they expected no better being after, would have scorned to live, had they known any.”
Source: Urne Burial
“Where we desire to be informed 'tis good to contest with men above ourselves; but to confirm and establish our opinions, 'tis best to argue with judgments below our own, that the frequent spoils and victories over their reasons may settle in ourselves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our own.”
“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.”
“He that unburied lies wants not his hearse, For unto him a tomb's the Universe.”
Source: Religio Medici: To which is Added Hydriotaphia, Or Urn-burial; a Discourse on Sepulchral Urns
“Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years.”
Source: Religio Medici: A Letter to a Friend, Christian Morals, Urn-burial, and Other Papers
“There is nothing strictly immortal, but immortality. Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end.”
Source: Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Or, Enquiries Into Very Many Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths
“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.”
Source: Sir Thomas Browne's Works, Including His Life and Correspondence: Pseudodoxia epidemica, books 4-7. The garden of Cyrus. Hydriotaphia. Brampton urns
“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.”
Source: The Works of Sir Thomas Browne: Hydriotaphia. Brampton urns. A letter to a friend, upon occasion of the death of his intimate friend. Christian morals, &c. Miscellany tracts. Repertorium. Miscellanies. Domestic correspondence, journals, &c. Miscellaneous correspondence
“He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself (Christian morals).”
“Rich with the spoils of nature.”
Source: Sir Thomas Browne's Works: Religio medici. Pseudoxia epidemica, books 1-3
“There are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces.”
Source: Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici: Or, the Christian Religion, as Professed by a Physician; Freed from Priest-craft and the Jargon of Schools
“I had rather stand the shock of a basilisk than the fury of a merciless pen.”
Source: Sir Thomas Browne's Religio medici: Urn burial, Christian morals, and other essays
“The discourses of the table among true loving friends are held in strict silence.”
“A wise man is out of the reach of fortune.”
Source: The Works of Sir Thomas Browne: Pseudodoxia epidemica, books V-VII. Religio medici. The garden of Cyprus
“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.”
Source: Miscellaneous Works of Sir Thomas Browne: With Some Account of the Author and His Writings
“There is music wherever there is harmony, order and proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.”
“Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?”
Source: The Works of Sir Thomas Browne: Hydriotaphia. Brampton urns. A letter to a friend, upon occasion of the death of his intimate friend. Christian morals, &c. Miscellany tracts. Repertorium. Miscellanies. Domestic correspondence, journals, &c. Miscellaneous correspondence
“No man can justly censure or condemn another, because indeed no man truly knows another.”
Source: Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici: Or, the Christian Religion, as Professed by a Physician; Freed from Priest-craft and the Jargon of Schools
“Be thou what thou singly art and personate only thyself. Swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature and live but one man.”
Source: Selected Writings
“What then is the wisdom of the times called old? Is it the wisdom of gray hairs? No. It is the wisdom of the cradle.”
“As for those wingy mysteries in divinity, and airy subtleties in religion, which have unhinged the brains of better heads, they never stretched the pia mater of mine; methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith.”
“For my part, I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are witches.”
Source: Sir Thomas Browne's Works: Religio medici. Pseudoxia epidemica, books 1-3
“Praise is a debt we owe unto the virtue of others, and due unto our own from all whom malice hath not made mutes, or envy struck dumb.”
Source: Religio Medici [and] Its Sequel Christian Morals
“The world, which took six days to make, is likely to take us six thousand years to make out.”
Source: Religio medici, and other works
“Should your riches increase, let your mind keep pace with them.”
“They do most by Books, who could do much without them, and he that chiefly owes himself unto himself, is the substantial Man.”
Source: Religio Medici [and] Its Sequel Christian Morals
“With what shift and pains we come into the World we remember not; but 'tis commonly found no easy matter to get out of it.”
Source: The Works of Sir Thomas Browne: Hydriotaphia. Brampton urns. A letter to a friend, upon occasion of the death of his intimate friend. Christian morals, &c. Miscellany tracts. Repertorium. Miscellanies. Domestic correspondence, journals, &c. Miscellaneous correspondence
“I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof, 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures.”
“Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion, wherein stones and clouts make martyrs.”
“Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world.”
Source: Religio Medici: Hydriotaphia : and the Letter to a Friend
“Where I cannot satisfy my reason, I love to humour my fancy.”
Source: The Works of Sir Thomas Browne: Pseudodoxia epidemica, books V-VII. Religio medici. The garden of Cyprus
“To me avarice seems not so much a vice as a deplorable piece of madness.”
Source: Selected Writings
“There is something in us that can be without us, and will be after us, though indeed it hath no history of what it was before us, and cannot tell how it entered into us.”
