Francis Bacon Quotes
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There are many wise men that have secret hearts and transparent countenances.
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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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They are the best physicians, who being great in learning most incline to the traditions of experience, or being distinguished in practice do not reflect the methods and generalities of art.
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Friends are thieves of time.
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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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If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.
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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 were taken apples, and ... closed up in wax. ... After a month's space, the apple inclosed in was was as green and fresh as the first putting in, and the kernals continued white. The cause is, for that all exclusion of open air, which is ever predatory, maintaineth the body in its first freshness and moisture.
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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
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In civil business; what first? boldness; what second and third? boldness: and yet boldness is a child of ignorance and baseness.
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The way of fortune is like the milky way in the sky; which is a meeting, or knot, of a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together : so are there a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.
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I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being.
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Nor is mine a trumpet which summons and excites men to cut each other to pieces with mutual contradictions, or to quarrel and fight with one another; but rather to make peace between themselves, and turning with united forces against the Nature of Things.
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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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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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There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
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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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What then remains but that we still should cry Not to be born, or, being born, to die?
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The divisions of science are not like different lines that meet in one angle, but rather like the branches of trees that join in one trunk.
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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.
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Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.
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I should have been, I don't know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.
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There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.