Francis Bacon Quotes
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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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It is impossible to love and to be wise.
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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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None of the affections have been noted to fascinate and bewitch but envy.
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There was a young man in Rome that was very like Augustus Caesar; Augustus took knowledge of it and sent for the man, and asked him "Was your mother never at Rome?" He answered "No Sir; but my father was."
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I work for posterity, these things requiring ages for their accomplishment.
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I'm working for myself; what else have I got to work for? How can you work for an audience? What do you imagine an audience would want? I have got nobody to excite except myself, so I am always surprised if anyone likes my work sometimes. I suppose I'm very lucky, of course, to be able to earn my living by something that really absorbs me to try to do, if that is what you call luck.
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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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If my people look as if they're in a dreadful fix, it's because I can't get them out of a technical dilemma.
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The surest way to prevent seditions...is to take away the matter of them.
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There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.
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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'.
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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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It's not what we eat but what we digest that makes us strong; not what we gain but what we save that makes us rich; not what we read but what we remember that makes us learned; and not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity.
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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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Reading maketh a full 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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It's not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity.
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Those that want friends to open themselves unto are cannibals of their own hearts.
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Of great wealth there is no real use, except in its distribution, the rest is just conceit.
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The greatest trust, between man and man, is the trust of giving counsel. For in other confidences, men commit the parts of life; their lands, their goods, their children, their credit, some particular affair; but to such as they make their counsellors, they commit the whole: by how much the more, they are obliged to all faith and integrity.
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Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws.
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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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...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.