Francis Bacon Quotes
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My painting is not violent, it's life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.
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The breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air than in the hand.
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Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution.
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Since custom is the principal magistrate of man's life, let men by all means endeavor to obtain good customs.
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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
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We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.
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God never wrought miracles to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it.
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Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.
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You see, painting has now become, or all art has now become completely a game, by which man distracts himself. What is fascinating actually is, that it's going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to become any good at all.
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Truth ... is the sovereign good of human nature.
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There is no great concurrence between learning and wisdom.
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It is impossible to love and to be wise.
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Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.
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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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There is a cunning which we in England call the rning of the cat in the pan.
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Pyrrhus, when his friends congratulated to him his victory over the Romans under Fabricius, but with great slaughter of his own side, said to them, 'Yes; but if we have such another victory, we are undone'.
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I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.
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There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.
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Audacter calumniare, semper aliquid haeret.
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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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Such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener.
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Suspicion amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they never fly by twilight.
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I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.
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There are many wise men that have secret hearts and transparent countenances.