Francis Bacon Quotes
-
Perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.
-
The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance - if it is not irrational, you make illustration.
-
The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
-
As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.
-
Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.
-
Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws.
-
Nothing doth so much keep men out of the Church, and drive men out of the Church, as breach of unity.
-
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.
-
The greatest vicissitude of things amongst men is the vicissitude of sects and religions.
-
Learning hath his infancy, when it is but beginning and almost childish; then his youth, when it is luxuriant and juvenile; then his strength of years, when it is solid and reduced; and lastly his old age, when it waxeth dry and exhaust.
-
It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.
-
It's always hopeless to talk about painting - one never does anything but talk around it.
-
Ipsa scientia potestas est. (Knowledge itself is power.)
-
Some men covet knowledge out of a natural curiosity and inquisitive temper; some to entertain the mind with variety and delight; some for ornament and reputation; some for victory and contention; many for lucre and a livelihood; and but few for employing the Divine gift of reason to the use and benefit of mankind.
-
As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.
-
Custom is the principle magistrate of man's life.
-
So ambitious men, if they find the way open for their rising, and still get forward, they are rather busy than dangerous; but if they be checked in their desires, they become secretly discontent, and look upon men and matters with an evil eye, and are best pleased, when things go backward.
-
The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.
-
By this means we presume we have established for ever, a true and legitimate marriage between the Empirical and Rational faculty; whose fastidious and unfortunate divorce and separation hath troubled and disordered the whole race and generation of mankind.
-
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.
-
The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.
-
The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.
-
It's not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity.
-
Science is but an image of the truth.