Francis Bacon Quotes
-
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.
-
Time is the greatest innovator.
-
Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.
-
Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.
-
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It is a great happiness when men's professions and their inclinations accord.
-
God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.
-
The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or the wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.
-
There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.
-
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.
-
The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.
-
A bachelor's life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.
-
Money is like manure, of very little use except it be spread.
-
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'.
-
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.
-
An artist must learn to be nourished by his passions and by his despairs.
-
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted... but to weigh and consider.
-
Of great wealth there is no real use, except in its distribution, the rest is just conceit.
-
Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.
-
A good name is like a precious ointment; it filleth all around about, and will not easily away; for the odors of ointments are more durable than those of flowers.
-
The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.