Francis Bacon Quotes
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Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God.
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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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Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people`s plates.
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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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Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns the water, or but writes in dust.
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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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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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It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth . . . and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.
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Defer not charities till death; for certainly, if a man weigh it rightly, he that doth so is rather liberal of another man's than of his own.
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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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Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.
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If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.
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What then remains but that we still should cry Not to be born, or, being born, to die?
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The dignity of this end of endowment of man's life with new commodity appeareth by the estimation that antiquity made of such as guided thereunto ; for whereas founders of states, lawgivers, extirpators of tyrants, fathers of the people, were honoured but with the titles of demigods, inventors ere ever consecrated among the gods themselves.
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Friends are thieves of time.
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The greatest vicissitude of things amongst men is the vicissitude of sects and religions.
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Nobility of birth commonly abateth industry.
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All superstition is much the same whether it be that of astrology, dreams, omen, retributive judgment, or the like, in all of which the deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect and pass over their failure, though it be much more common.
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God loveth the clean.
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Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.
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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
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Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.
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Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.