Francis Bacon Quotes
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Seeming wise men may make shift to get opinion; but let no man choose them for employment; for certainly you were better take for business, a man somewhat absurd, than over-formal.
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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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Reading maketh a full man.
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Great boldness is seldom without some absurdity.
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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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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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The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
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Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
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Liberty of speech invites and provokes liberty to be used again, and so bringeth much to a man's knowledge.
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Nil terribile nisi ipse timor.
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Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns the water, or but writes in dust.
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Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.
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He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
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The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.
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If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
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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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In one and the same fire, clay grows hard and wax melts.
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The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.
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He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.
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Nay, number (itself) in armies, importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for (as Virgil saith) it never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.
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A cat will never drown if she sees the shore.
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Knowledge and human power are synonymous.
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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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Great Hypocrites are the real atheists.