Francis Bacon Quotes
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Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand - and melting like a snowflake.
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A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object; but there is no tension in the picture unless there is a struggle with the object.
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He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.
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Knowledge and human power are synonymous.
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God's first creature, which was light.
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I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.
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Princes are like heavenly bodies, which cause good or evil times, and which have much veneration but no rest.
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The doctrines of religion are resolved into carefulness; carefulness into vigorousness; vigorousness into guiltlessness; guiltlessness into abstemiousness; abstemiousness into cleanliness; cleanliness into godliness.
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There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.
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Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.
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It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.
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Let no one think or maintain that a person can search too far or be too well studied in either the book of God's word or the book of God's works.
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Why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me?
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The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.
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Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.
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We must see whether the same clock with weights will go faster at the top of a mountain or at the bottom of a mine; it is probable, if the pull of the weights decreases on the mountain and increases in the mine, that the earth has real attraction.
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There is superstition in avoiding superstition.
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When a bee stings, she dies. She cannot sting and live. When men sting, their better selves die. Every sting kills a better instinct. Men must not turn bees and kill themselves in stinging others.
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Audacter calumniare, semper aliquid haeret.
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Moreover, the works already known are due to chance and experiment rather than to sciences; for the sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented; not methods of invention or directions for new works.
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A graceful and pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation.
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It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.
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But the idols of the Market Place are the most troublesome of all: idols which have crept into the understanding through their alliances with words and names. For men believe that their reason governs words. But words turn and twist the understanding. This it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences inactive. Words are mostly cut to the common fashion and draw the distinctions which are most obvious to the common understanding. Whenever an understanding of greater acuteness or more diligent observation would alter those lines to suit the true distinctions of nature, words complain.
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That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.