Francis Bacon Quotes
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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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A man finds himself seven years older the day after his marriage.
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If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.
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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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The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes; and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
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Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.
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For man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection: and they be three wisdoms of divers natures, which do often sever: wisdom of the behaviour, wisdom of business, and wisdom of state.
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Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.
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The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.
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As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.
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Custom is the principle magistrate of man's life.
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I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don't in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.
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Money is a good servant, a dangerous master.
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Such philosophy as shall not vanish in the fume of subtile, sublime, or delectable speculation but shall be operative to the endowment and betterment of man's life.
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There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.
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The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.
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There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.
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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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There is a great difference between the Idols of the human mind and the Ideas of the divine. That is to say, between certain empty dogmas, and the true signatures and marks set upon the works of creation as they are found in nature.
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It is natural to die as to be born.
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Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.
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There is no such flatterer as is a man's self.
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God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.
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Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.