Francis Bacon Quotes
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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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The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.
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My Lord St. Albans said that Nature did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high, and therefore that exceeding tall men had ever very empty heads.
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Art is man added to Nature.
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There is no passion in the mind of man so weak, but it mates and masters the fear of death . . . Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it.
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Audacter calumniare, semper aliquid haeret.
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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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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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There is superstition in avoiding superstition.
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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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Suspicions that the mind, of itself, gathers, are but buzzes; but suspicions that are artificially nourished and put into men's heads by the tales and whisperings of others, have stings.
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A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.
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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.
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Why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me?
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Let the mind be enlarged... to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind.
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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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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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Hope is the most beneficial of all the affections, and doth much to the prolongation of life.
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Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.
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My praise shall be dedicated to the mind itself. The mind is the man, and the knowledge is the mind. A man is but what he knoweth. The mind is but an accident to knowledge, for knowledge is the double of that which is.
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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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The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man's self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.
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Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns the water, or but writes in dust.
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Silence is the virtue of fools.