Sir Thomas Browne's Works: Memoirs of Sir Thomas Browne. Domestic correspondence, journals. Miscellaneous correspondence

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Page lxxxv - That there were such creatures as witches, he made no doubt at all. For, first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much. Secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.
Page xxx - Socrates warmed his doubtful spirits against that cold potion ; and Cato, before he durst give the fatal stroke, spent part of the night in reading the immortality of Plato, thereby confirming his wavering hand unto the animosity of that attempt. 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.
Page lxxxiii - ... he conceived, that these swooning fits were natural, and nothing else but that they call the mother, but only heightened to a great excess by the subtilty of the devil, cooperating with the malice of these which we term witches, at whose instance he doth these villainies.
Page lxiii - Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity, with incarnation and resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, certum est quia impossibile est.
Page xliv - They that knew no more of him than by the briskness of his writings, found themselves deceived in their expectation, when they came in his company, noting the gravity and sobriety of his aspect and conversation ; so free from loquacity or much talkativeness, that he was something difficult to be engaged in any discourse ; though when he was so, it was always singular, and never trite or vulgar.
Page xxvi - a lady," says Whitefoot, " of such symmetrical proportion to her worthy husband, both in the graces of her body and mind, that they seemed to come together by a kind of natural magnetism.
Page l - His style is, indeed, a tissue of many languages ; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another.
Page lxxxiii - That in Denmark there had been lately a great discovery of witches, who used the very same way of afflicting persons, by conveying pins into them, and crooked, as these pins were, with needles and nails. And his opinion was, That the devil, in such cases, did work upon the bodies of men and women, upon a natural foundation...
Page xlii - Honour a physician with the honour due unto him for the uses which ye may have of him : for the Lord hath created him.
Page xxxii - ... produce to the world an object of wonder to which nature had contributed little. To this ambition, perhaps, we owe the frogs of Homer, the gnat and the bees of Virgil, the butterfly of Spenser, the shadow of Wowerus, and the quincunx of Browne.

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