Francis Bacon Quotes
-
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.
-
God loveth the clean.
-
As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.
-
The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.
-
Cosmus, Duke of Florence, was wont to say of perfidious friends, that 'We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.'
-
Money is a good servant, a dangerous master.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.
-
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.
-
A much talking judge is an ill-tuned cymbal.
-
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
-
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.
-
A bachelor's life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.
-
I don't believe art is available; it's rare and curious and should be completely isolated; one is more aware of its magic the more it is isolated.
-
It would be an unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried.
-
It is natural to die as to be born.
-
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.
-
Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable.
-
The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.
-
Pyrrhus, when his friends congratulated to him his victory over the Romans under Fabricius, but with great slaughter of his own side, said to them, 'Yes; but if we have such another victory, we are undone'.
-
The sun, which passeth through pollutions and itself remains as pure as before.
-
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.
-
Lucid intervals and happy pauses.