Francis Bacon Quotes
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The greatest vicissitude of things amongst men is the vicissitude of sects and religions.
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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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...those experiments be not only esteemed which have an immediate and present use, but those principally which are of most universal consequence for invention of other experiments, and those which give more light to the invention of causes; for the invention of the mariner's needle, which giveth the direction, is of no less benefit for navigation than the invention of the sails, which give the motion.
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The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
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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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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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Since custom is the principal magistrate of man's life, let men by all means endeavor to obtain good customs.
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There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.
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A much talking judge is an ill-tuned cymbal.
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The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.
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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.
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There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
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Perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.
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To conclude, therefore, let no man upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation think or maintain that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or the book of God's works, divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavor an endless progress or proficience in both; only let men beware that they apply both to charity, and not to swelling; to use, and not to ostentation; and again, that they do not unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together.
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Nay, number (itself) in armies, importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for (as Virgil saith) it never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.
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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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Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.
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It's not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity.
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If there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire.
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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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Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
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It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.
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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.