Francis Bacon Quotes
-
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
-
Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.
-
Money is like manure, of very little use except it be spread.
-
A man finds himself seven years older the day after his marriage.
-
The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance - if it is not irrational, you make illustration.
-
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'.
-
For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
-
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.
-
If there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire.
-
One always starts work with the subject, no matter how tenuous it is, and one constructs an artificial structure by which one can trap the reality of the subject-matter that one has started from.
-
I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.
-
They are the best physicians, who being great in learning most incline to the traditions of experience, or being distinguished in practice do not reflect the methods and generalities of art.
-
Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
-
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.
-
I usually accept bribes from both sides so that tainted money can never influence my decision.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If any human being earnestly desire to push on to new discoveries instead of just retaining and using the old; to win victories over Nature as a worker rather than over hostile critics as a disputant; to attain, in fact, clear and demonstrative knowlegde instead of attractive and probable theory; we invite him as a true son of Science to join our ranks.
-
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.
-
Fortune makes him fool, whom she makes her darling.
-
Nothing doth so much keep men out of the Church, and drive men out of the Church, as breach of unity.
-
When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.
-
I work for posterity, these things requiring ages for their accomplishment.
-
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.