Francis Bacon Quotes
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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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He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marry. A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.
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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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Perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.
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Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
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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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Nothing opens the heart like a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes...and whatever lies upon the heart.
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The greatest trust, between man and man, is the trust of giving counsel. For in other confidences, men commit the parts of life; their lands, their goods, their children, their credit, some particular affair; but to such as they make their counsellors, they commit the whole: by how much the more, they are obliged to all faith and integrity.
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Silence is the virtue of fools.
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There was never law, or sect, or opinion did so much magnify goodness, as the Christian religion doth.
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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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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
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Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
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God's first creature, which was light.
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Brutes by their natural instinct have produced many discoveries, whereas men by discussion and the conclusions of reason have given birth to few or none.
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The only hope [of science] ... is in genuine induction.
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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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I think I tend to destroy the better paintings, or those that have been better to a certain extent. I try and take them further, and they lose all their qualities, and they lose everything. I think I would say that I destroy all the better paintings.
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Come home to men's business and bosoms.
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If there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire.
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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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He that hath knowledge spareth his words.
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Of all the things in nature, the formation and endowment of man was singled out by the ancients.
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It's always hopeless to talk about painting - one never does anything but talk around it.