Francis Bacon Quotes
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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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I work for posterity, these things requiring ages for their accomplishment.
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Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.
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A man finds himself seven years older the day after his marriage.
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The only hope [of science] ... is in genuine induction.
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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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That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.
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Opportunity makes a thief.
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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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The light that a man receives by counsel from another is drier and purer than that which comes from his own understanding and judgment, which is ever infused and drenched in his affections and customs.
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Why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me?
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A man that is young in years may be old in hours if he have lost no time.
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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.
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I like, you may say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth, and I've always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.
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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.
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Let no one think or maintain that a person can search too far or be too well studied in either the book of God's word or the book of God's works.
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By far the best proof is experience.
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None of the affections have been noted to fascinate and bewitch but envy.
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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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The sun, which passeth through pollutions and itself remains as pure as before.
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He that defers his charity 'till he is dead, is (if a man weighs it rightly) rather liberal of another man's, than of his own.
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Since my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding, not that it may with the slender tendrils of the mind snatch at and lay hold of abstract notions (as the common logic does), but that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things.
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I should have been, I don't know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.
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As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.