Francis Bacon Quotes
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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.
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It's not what we eat but what we digest that makes us strong; not what we gain but what we save that makes us rich; not what we read but what we remember that makes us learned; and not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity.
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Perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.
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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.
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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.
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Custom is the principle magistrate of man's life.
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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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He that hath knowledge spareth his words.
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Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
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There is no such flatterer as is a man's self.
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Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.
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For my name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.
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A much talking judge is an ill-tuned cymbal.
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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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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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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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The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance - if it is not irrational, you make illustration.
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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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The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
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Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
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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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Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.
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Sacred and inspired divinity, the sabaoth and port of all men's labours and peregrinations.