Francis Bacon Quotes
-
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.
-
No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic, and certainly, to a kingdom or estate, a just and honourable war is the true exercise.
-
Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.
-
Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.
-
It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.
-
All artists are vain, they long to be recognized and to leave something to posterity. They want to be loved, and at the same time they want to be free. But nobody is free.
-
There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.
-
I like, you may say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth, and I've always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.
-
Nobility of birth commonly abateth industry.
-
That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.
-
Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.
-
Friends are thieves of time.
-
The place of justice is a hallowed place.
-
Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
-
Money is a good servant, a dangerous master.
-
Since custom is the principal magistrate of man's life, let men by all means endeavor to obtain good customs.
-
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
-
Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.
-
If my people look as if they're in a dreadful fix, it's because I can't get them out of a technical dilemma.
-
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.
-
None of the affections have been noted to fascinate and bewitch but envy.
-
I have to hope that my instincts will do the right thing, because I can't erase what I have done. And if I drew something first, then my paintings would be illustrations of drawings.
-
I'm working for myself; what else have I got to work for? How can you work for an audience? What do you imagine an audience would want? I have got nobody to excite except myself, so I am always surprised if anyone likes my work sometimes. I suppose I'm very lucky, of course, to be able to earn my living by something that really absorbs me to try to do, if that is what you call luck.
-
It's always hopeless to talk about painting - one never does anything but talk around it.