Science Quote by Thomas Browne

The jab lands because it reverses the usual alibi. “Fortune” is the classic scapegoat: an impersonal goddess you can blame when plans collapse. Browne flips it with a calm, almost clinical rebuke: the problem isn’t the world’s randomness, it’s our perception. In one short line he turns misfortune from a cosmic verdict into an epistemic failure.

That framing makes perfect sense for Thomas Browne, a 17th-century physician-naturalist writing in a culture where plague, war, and religious conflict made “bad luck” feel like a daily weather system. Early modern science was also teaching a new habit of mind: observe closely, distrust superstition, admit what you don’t know. Browne isn’t pretending fortune doesn’t exist; he’s saying we mythologize it to avoid the harder work of seeing clearly - patterns, causes, our own mistakes, and the limits of our control.

The subtext is moral without being preachy. “Blind” implicates the self: not just ignorance, but a willful squinting away from responsibility. It’s also a warning about narrative comfort. “Fortune” offers a neat story - I was doomed, the universe had it out for me - while blindness is messy, personal, correctable.

In a modern register, the line skewers the algorithmic-era equivalent of fortune: vibes, fate, “the universe,” whatever lets us outsource agency. Browne’s sting is that the world may be chaotic, but our first misread is thinking chaos absolves us.