Francis Bacon Quotes
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I want to make portraits and images. I don't know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.
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Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.
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As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.
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Ipsa scientia potestas est. (Knowledge itself is power.)
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Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.
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The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.
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We rise to great heights by a winding staircase of small steps.
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Opportunity makes a thief.
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Nay, number (itself) in armies, importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for (as Virgil saith) it never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.
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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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Money is like manure, of very little use except it be spread.
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In nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place.
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It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.
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An artist must learn to be nourished by his passions and by his despairs.
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A much talking judge is an ill-tuned cymbal.
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Nothing doth so much keep men out of the Church, and drive men out of the Church, as breach of unity.
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Such philosophy as shall not vanish in the fume of subtile, sublime, or delectable speculation but shall be operative to the endowment and betterment of man's life.
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Anger is certainly a kind of baseness; as it appears well in the weakness of those subjects in whom it reigns; children, women, old folks, sick folks. Only men must beware, that they carry their anger rather with scorn, than with fear; so that they may seem rather to be above the injury, than below it; which is a thing easily done, if a man will give law to himself in it.
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Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
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And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes, like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air.
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Science is but an image of the truth.
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There is no such flatterer as is a man's self.
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The surest way to prevent seditions...is to take away the matter of them.
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When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.