Francis Bacon Quotes
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Observation and experiment for gathering material, induction and deduction for elaborating it: these are are only good intellectual tools.
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The place of justice is a hallowed place.
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Dreams, and predictions of astrology....ought to serve but for winter talk by the fireside.
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The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.
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It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!
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No one has yet been found so firm of mind and purpose as resolutely to compel himself to sweep away all theories and common notions, and to apply the understanding, thus made fair and even, to a fresh examination of particulars. Thus it happens that human knowledge, as we have it, is a mere medley and ill-digested mass, made up of much credulity and much accident, and also of the childish notions which we at first imbibed.
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A sudden bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.
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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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For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
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God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.
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Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; adversity not without many comforts and hopes.
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Money is like muck, not good unless spread.
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Judges ought to be more leaned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.
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Disciples do owe their masters only a temporary belief, and a suspension of their own judgment till they be fully instructed.
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…it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives…
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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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Money is a good servant, a dangerous master.
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Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable.
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Envy is ever joined with the comparing of a man's self; and where there is no comparison, no envy.
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Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.
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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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Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
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There is in man's nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable, as it is seen sometimes in friars. Nuptial love maketh mankind, friendly love perfecteth it, but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it.
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Great boldness is seldom without some absurdity.