14 Sir Thomas Browne Quotes on Death

Sir Thomas Browne quotes on death

12. This reasonable moderator, and equal piece of justice, Death.

13. I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof; 'tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure us that our nearest friends, Wife, and Children stand afraid and start at us.

27. For the world, I count it not an Inn, but a Hospital, and a place, not to live, but to die in.

31. We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life.

33. Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.

38. Times before you, when even the living men were Antiquities; when the living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world, could not be properly said, to go unto the greater number.

40. A Dialogue between two Infants in the womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Plato's Den, and are but Embryon Philosophers.

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

42. Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things.

43. The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

51. But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of Bravery, in the infamy of his nature.

53. Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and the light but the shadow of God.

55. To keep our eyes open longer were but to set our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsy at that hour which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbering thoughts at that time, when sleep itself must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again?

57. Not to be content with Life is the unsatisfactory state of those which destroy themselves; who being afraid to live, run blindly upon their own Death, which no Man fears by Experience.