Francis Bacon Quotes
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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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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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God loveth the clean.
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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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Those that want friends to open themselves unto are cannibals of their own hearts.
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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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I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.
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Lucid intervals and happy pauses.
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The greatest vicissitude of things amongst men is the vicissitude of sects and religions.
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Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.
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I usually accept bribes from both sides so that tainted money can never influence my decision.
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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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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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Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.
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Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
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Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.
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There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.
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Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second. For there is a youth in thoughts, as well as in ages. And yet the invention of young men, is more lively than that of old; and imaginations stream into their minds better, and, as it were, more divinely.
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But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this - that men despair and think things impossible.
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Money is a good servant, a dangerous master.
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It is natural to die as to be born.
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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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The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.
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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.